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A Year in Studying: 2016 Japanese Goal Compilation

Every month in 2016 we had a Japanese goal achievement post, where people shared what they wanted to accomplish. This is my favorite series as I think everyone seeing what everyone else is doing is both great motivation and a powerful resource.

All of 2016’s post comments have been compiled below. The comments are all on one page to make it easier to do a search by name and find all your entries. The page will be slightly slower loading with the heavy comment load, so you might want to check it out on a desktop.

This is the full snapshot of the year, and how everyone has moved forward. Search over the entire year, see everything you wanted to do, everything you did, and everything you didn’t. Use this to reflect and become even stronger. Leave a final comment on this post to talk about anything you want to from your 2016 studying.

I hope everyone continues to participate in these monthly threads for 2017! Let’s make this an amazing year of Japanese adventure.

1: I decided to up the pace a bit as I was so close to the end, so I will actually be finishing stage 8 as well this weekend. Anki time is approaching 4 hours at the moment, but I can live with that for 5 more days :)
2: I have done lots of immersion this month. I decided to stop adding new words for now, and focus on stage 8 of Jalup Expert instead. I consider the goal a success.
Bonus: Kanji Kingdom was released so I have also been doing that at a pace 5 of cards per day.

Update post
1. I should finish exactly on Jan 31
2. Should finish in 9 days
3. Should finish in 5 days
4. Should finish in 12 days
5. Classes start Jan 15
6. Pretty much achieved
7. Should finish in under 15 days

Done with everything so far except RTK and Core 2k, it was a bit naive for me to make such goals because they require you to do kanji/core2k EVERY DAY, it made me accumlate some burdens like missing a day and being in debt, also I went pretty aggressive with 26 cards a day which made my reviews crazy so I decided next month I will just do reviews until my review count per day for each deck is under 30 then start new cards. I quit on the Japanesepod101 goal but I still listen occasionally to it.

Should’ve seen it coming, my goals were too intense to complete.
1. I finished 640/780, not bad progress
2. Completed Human Japanese
3. Completed Jalup beginner stage 1
4. Finished 1 step and had 146/400 left
5&6 so far so good
7. I quit on JPod101 because I immerse so much and it so much easier to immerse

It has been a while since I last posted goals here. The motivation has been a bit down, but I have managed to keep up with my reviews at least. Now it is time to set some new goals!

– Keep up with Anki reviews (this one shouldn’t be any problem, but still an important goal to always have in mind)
– Finish Jalup Intermediate Stage 1 (157 cards left)
– Buy and read Japanese Graded Readers level 1 volume 1 (I already made it through all 3 volumes of level 0, so I’m very excited for level 1!)

Not all too ambitious goals, so I should be able to reach them no problem!

Just a small update on a change in goals.. I decided to wait for January sale to buy Japanese Graded Readers. From a money-point-of-view that was great, since I got all 3 volumes of level 1 for the price of 2! However it took a while for them to ship, probably due to being busy because of the sale… And now my books have been stuck in customs all weekend, and still haven’t cleared, so I will probably not get them until late this week or early next week. To still be able to reach my third goal for January I have instead purchased the Jalup Beginner Stories, which I apparently never got around to, and have started reading those.

Today I finished the first stage of jalup intermediat! Feels great moving forward like this. I’ve started to be more comfortable with J-J. Some definitions still have a hard time sinking in, some cards I first really get after some time has passed. Suddenly some things just clicks and makes sense.

I also finished the last beginner story today. Good reads ! Laughed on multiple occasions.. I did not understand 100%, but it came reasonably close.

Ok. I’ve decided, there’s no point in waiting anymore. This 2016 I’m going to Japan, and I’m getting exited just thinking about it. This resolution actually got me pumped to study Japanese like crazy. So yeah, on January I’ll be on j-j as planned, and then I’ll do everything I can to get into jalup advanced before the big day.

1. Daily reviews on Anki of RTK Mod, Beginner, and intermediate
2. Add at least 180 new J-J cards during the month
3. Continue listening to Japanese immersion when driving to work and during down times in day.

Last month I had trouble adding enough new J-J cards because I was bogged down in J-J anki reviews that would sometimes take 80 minutes and the last 20 minutes were extremely painful as it was those 10 or so cards I was having trouble remembering repeatedly and was dreading reviews. I read advice on this website to consider marking wrong cards as hard rather than again. I tried it for the last few days (sometimes marking again for one round if they are greater then 4 days for next review) and it has made anki reviews much less painful. Feel this technique will let me reach the goal new cards.

1. Complete Anki reviews to try to bring down review burden.
2. I am OK with the Jalup intermediate and advanced sentences themselves, but the definitions give me trouble. Any suggestions?
I think I shall read through the flat files and try to understand the definitions smoothly.
3. Read through Genki II

This month, and the next several months, will be interesting as I will be taking French 101 in addition to the self study of Japanese I have been doing. The two languages will likely not interfere with each other very much, but there’s time that I could be using to study Japanese that I’ll have to put toward French, which might hamper my progress. We’ll see how this goes.

I’d recommend using Duolingo for french. I am also in the same dilemma of taking French and learning Japanese. The only issue I’ve found so far is if I do anki before french class starts, I keep replying in Japanese in my head for the first 10 minutes of class.

Thanks for the advice! Yeah, I accidentally replied はい to three questions in class last Thursday (＞＜) I’m working on doing Anki more in the morning, which might help a bit as French is a night class.
I did try out Duolingo for a bit, but I prefer more grammar instruction than Duolingo gives, so I’m using some other resources for now.

1. Nope. I think I’m gonna put this book on hold for now as I have a couple new books coming from Amazon soon.
2. I am still watching 銀魂, but bought volumes of other manga instead.
3. I combined my five Anki decks into one deck about three weeks ago, so I don’t know if I’ve completed it or not.
4. Nope. I realized that I’ve been trying to read these two manga since October, so putting these on hold too since three months is too long for 350 pages of manga. I did read 刹那グラフィーティ volume 1 a couple days ago. That only took a day and a half, which goes to show how important motivation is for getting stuff done. :)
5. Haha nope.

It turns out that French is not interfering with Japanese much, which is great. As I get better at French, though, I’ll definitely have to devote more time to it. However, that’s a bit of a ways away.

1. 黒子のバスケ vol. 1, 東京グール vol. 3 if they come on time.
2. 1500+ kanji in RTK mod deck. I’ve decided to go through RTK again, but using the mod deck this time instead of the NihongoShark one. I’m 620 kanji in right now and am adding 30 a day. At the rate I’m going, I’ll finish in early March.
3. ハイキュー‼︎ light novel volume 1 if it comes on time.
4. Memorize the lyrics and learn all unknown words in at least 2 songs.

Small goal revision: 東京グール vol. 3 came today, but it’s been so long since I’ve read the earlier volumes that I think I’m going to reread those first. I’ll probably still be able to make it to volume three, but we’ll see.

1. I read both in addition to the first two volumes of 東京グール.
2. I have slightly over 1400 added right now. I will most likely be over 1500 by the end of the month.
3. It came, but I’m bored to death. I might read it later. Surprisingly, it’s not kanji that I’m having difficulty with, but instead the large amount of onomatopoeia, which is one of my weakest areas. I’m going to rip a lot of sentences from this book later.
4. Haha nope. I have been looking for new music, though. I’ve found a couple of artists that I really like.

Yeah, I’ve read that article before and considered converting it into a deck, but I would probably end up having to find example sentences for most of the terms, which I don’t feel like doing haha. I actually own one of the books recommended at the bottom, Jazz Up Your Japanese With Onomatopoeia. As it has example sentences for all of the onomatopoeia taught in the book, I was going make that into a deck sometime, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Thanks for the recommendation, though! (*ﾟ▽ﾟ)ﾉ

1. 15 cards a day from JALUP Intermediate
2. Read 10 pages a day (or one chapter, whichever is shorter)
3. 10 minutes of skritter a day

This is my first time committing to a goal here. I can usually push myself hard without making these sort of public commitments but reading back over the 2015 goals and seeing everyone’s progress over time really made me want to be part of that public record.

Just crossed over Intermediate Stage 1 today. Starting to get used to J-J now. I had a couple days over the weekend where I had my kids, and could only maintain reviews and do a couple pages of reading, but otherwise going strong.

1. Yup, and will be at the halfway mark in Jalup Intermediate by month end
2. Yes, and will finish second book this month tonight or tomorrow
3. Yes. Interestingly this one was the hardest to keep up. No idea why, but doing more than 5 minutes of skritter a day gets really boring for me.

With the exception of the two weekends this month when I had my children (when just getting reviews done, and keeping up some passive immersion is a huge challenge) I really nailed this. I was surprised to find what a factor making this public commitment was in sticking to these goals. As I mentioned, I can usually push forward without much external motivation, but when the Intermediate deck reviews climbed up and up, there where many days when I wanted to skip adding new cards and get those reviews down, but pushed on anyways simply because I wanted to come back here and report a yes. Adjusting to J-J and only having a fuzzy understanding of cards at first, and watching that get clearer over time as I saw the new words in more contexts, has been a very challenging adjustment. Excited to push through the other side of this deck in a month or two.

1. I would like to have gone through at least 1000 J-J cards in my self-made deck. Right now I am at 475.
2. Read one book extensively to completion while going through one intensively. I bought a bunch of those Disney novels so I’ll probably do those.
3. Try not to glaze over any text while playing Pokemon X lol. I find I just skip to get to the action but I want to take my time and read everything everyone says. This one’s kind of a silly goal but I was thinking about it earlier.

1. I am at 57 mature cards and 951 Young+Learn at the moment! I’m pretty happy with this considering I only made the deck at the very end of December.

2. I actually ended up reading the first two books in the Narnia series extensively. I’ve been going through マレフィセント intensively and haven’t gotten very far because these branches are getting ridiculous lol. I love it though!

3. I’ve been taking my Japanese-Pokemon playing very seriously.

I was nervous that I wasn’t going to get any of this done but I did and I am happy with myself. I’m so glad I decided to stick to J-J and I really wish I had stuck with it years ago.

Wasn’t very clear. Get RTK&Core2k reviews under control. Recently purchased The rest of beginner series so I’ll be doing that. I plan to finish Stage 2 and stage 4 by end of the month (very reasonable goal).
So goals:
-Tame the review beast that has limited health regeneration until it can’t go past 30 a day
-Slay 75% of beginner phase (2 and 3)
-Listen to the tunes (can’t make a good rpg analogy for it (-.-) )
-Once the review beast tames, I will post my goals for it

Eh I gave on the goal of making the review beast to 30 (would take too long) and started to anki rtk after 1 week of pure review, still didn’t continue core 2k. Goal for rtk is minimum to finish 450 cards by the end of the month. I just finished beginner 2 so I might be able to reach beginner 4 or even some of intermediate by the end of the month. But first thing first, accomplish my goal. I’ve been doing immersion everyday. I’ve learned that making goals that I know I can accomplish actually motivates me to do even more.

Ah what is happening with me, I decided to continue reviewing RTK and make it low review amount a day. The reason I finally decided is because that deck is the most exhausting, willpower eating deck I have. It hurts enough to do the reviews but then the new cards drain me even more, so I might just not do any more new RTK cards this month and just review and review. I have been keeping up with Core2k review. If I keep up my pace of Jalup, I should finish stage 4 by end of february so that is my stretch goal. Immersion going smoothly, trying to watch more Doraemon for active immersion. I am very excited to get started with my J-J sentences in march (I don’t have money for intermediate T-T but I think I’ll be fine because others have done it before and I am bilingual which makes things a bit easier.

RTK Beast tamed to around 50~ reviews a day (not as low as I wanted but that couldn’t be helped)
I slayed both stages and starting on stage 4, should finish stage 4 exactly feb 29, very happy with this
Immersion everyday

Overall, this is a much bigger success than last month. I achieved all my goals,lowered my rtk reviews and should get started in J-J on march!

I feel like I have passed through my slump and have my motivation back up, so for February I will try with some more ambitious goals!

1. Keep up with reviews (as always). It is allowed to leave some hanging a few times if a day is busy, but at least some reviews should be done every day and at the end of the month no hanging reviews are allowed!

2. Add 50 new JALUP Intermediate cards. This is not very ambitious. At the moment I am adding 10 cards per day and feeling it is a pace I can keep up for a while. However the reviews will start piling up, so I might want to cut down on the number of new cards to get the reviews down sometime in the middle of the month.

3. Read volume 1 of Japanese Graded Readers level 1. I had this for January, but since the books didn’t arrive in time I changed that goal. It will now be my goal for February instead.

4. Watch 10 episodes of anime for fun. These are probably going to be DN Angel, since that is what I’m enjoying at the moment.

5. Watch 1 episode of のんのんびより each week for a total of 4. This will be intensive watching and trying to understand as much as possible.

6. Update my immersion device every week with the new anime episodes I have watched during the past week.

7. Do passive immersion for at least 2 hours every week. This is very low because I have not yet gotten to the stage where I can do other intensive tasks at the same time (like work or Anki). It wears me out completely and I have a hard time getting as much productive work done as I should.

So… 7 goals for February. That is a bunch, but I’m optimistic about them for the time being and want to utilize my motivation spike to get as much as possible done!

Just a small update since I progressed a bit this weekend. I finished watching DN Angel already, so I have to find something new to watch. I watched the first 5 minutes of Read or Die and that might be interesting, otherwise I may restart Sword Art Online II, since I never got to watch more than one or two episodes of that.

For goal 2 adding 50 new Intermediate cards will get me 321 cards into Intermediate, so I should be at least there at the end of February.

Since Kanji Kingdom stage 2 has been released I’ll add one more goal:

8. Finish Kanji Kingdom stage 2, I need to add less than 8 cards a day for that to happen, and I already did 26 today, so it should be no problem. The reviews from stage 1 is down to less than 10 per day already since I know most of the kanji well from my RTK mod deck.

And so came the last day of February. This month has been a blast for me! Overall I am very satisfied with my progress.

1. No problem – only a few days some where left hanging, and all caught up by now.
2. I finished stage 2 of Intermediate yesterday. Yay! My reviews are a bit high at the moment, but I managed to do it all which I am very pleased with.
3. I blasted through volume 1 the first week of February. I also finished volume 2 and half of volume 3.
4. I started watching Hunter x Hunter and man I got caught up in that fast. I managed to watch 132 episodes in just a single month, so I’m even almost finished with it. I really fell in love with both Gon and especially Killua and I’m very excited to see how it all ends.
5. I missed the one last week. I got so caught up in watching Hunter x Hunter that I just couldn’t stop. So I have only watched 3 episodes of Non Non Biyori this month. However I feel I got something valuable out of watching it. I have started to accept the fact that I will not get everything. That I mostly understand short and simple sentences and all the longer sentences I might pick out a word or two but otherwise it will go over my head. The acceptance I think is what will bring me forward with watching un-subbed things and I feel that is a major step forward.
6. I haven’t updated my immersion device quite as frequently. I’m listening to the Graded Readers level 0, which I mostly understand (maybe also because I read it already), and then I’m listening to two episodes of DN Angel that I really liked and have not tired of yet. I don’t quite get all of the dialog yet, but I fell I’m progressing a little every time I listen.
7. I didn’t keep exact track of these, but for the first three weeks I’m pretty sure I reached the 2 hour goal. For the last week I’m not sure, but I did do some listening at least so that’s better than nothing.
8. Finished these yesterday as well, it feels great to be up to the 8-stroke phase already. One thing I experienced with the KK vs RTK cards is that the KK cards take longer to review per cards, since I need to read a complete sentence and I try to recall all of the kanji keywords in the sentence as well. When I feel a bit down on motivation and for cards where the kanji is easy for me to remember I may skip reading the sentence just to make the reviews faster. However it does help with my hit rate, since kanji that I tend to forget or mix up I can get some hints for remembering by trying to identify the other kanji in the chain and deduce the right kanji from those hints.

All in all a powerful month, lots of progress and some great learning points achieved.

I completely forgot about some of the thought I have had about my learning process in February when I updated my goals yesterday.

J-J is definitely becoming easier, but some words really are more troublesome than others. Japanese definitions of physical objects I almost always get right away. Where I get in trouble a lot and really feel tempted to use the English crutch is with abstract words. 状態 is one example. Sometimes I feel like I don’t understand anything of the definition at all and sometimes I can’t even make any sense of the sentences the word belongs in either. This is where I have fallen back to the English crutch a few times. My strategy for overcoming this is to accept that I can’t get anything sensible out of neither sentence nor definition. If I remember all the readings and understand the grammar as well as the rest of the words in the sentence I will pass the card, even though it doesn’t make sense to me. I will spend some time every review trying to figure out the meaning using any new knowledge I have gotten in the mean time. I have used this strategy before J-J when I couldn’t make sense of a sentence despite knowing all the words and having the English definition. Those cards eventually came back and made sense to me, so I’m hoping this will work out for J-J cards as well.

Another thing I discovered is that sentences require much more attention than kanji reviews. If I do sentences in the evening I have a hard time understanding anything since I’m usually tired. So I have started prioritizing my sentences in the morning, to ensure I get new sentences when I still have a fresh mind.

1. Achieved. I’ve done pretty darn good not using subtitles. I actually go out of my way to not use them. This is kind of a problem with dramas but I’ve been able to find raw versions. I feel with dramas I’m sometimes missing key details, but I can follow what’s happening generally. The tv shows I watch are super easily to follow so I have no problems there.

2. Failed. I took on too much this year, work and graduate school were stressing me out so much that I didn’t have the energy to push myself. So I’ve corrected that problem and I’m hoping my energy will slowly start to come back and I can pick up my Anki pace again.

My goals
1 – Get for free the beginner, intermediate and advanced decks because Jalup owner is a nice person.
2 – Finish beginner deck in a week
3 – Finish intermediate deck in a week
4 – Finish advanced deck in two weeks
5 – Read a light novel
6 – Do advertising for this product because I’m being able to make it using jalup
7 – Profit hahaha :P

I would still HIGHLY advice against doing ~150 cards per day, and especially if you are a complete beginner (if you are not, then ignore this). You will start getting ~1000 reviews per day, and they will increase exponentially. Be prepared for ~3000 reviews/day (accounting for the diluted retention) after you finish advanced. It was more of a friendly advice than a criticism.

If you are REALLY set in doing this, I’d recommend not doing it on Anki, use the excel spreadsheets + memory techniques by Dominic O’Brian. If you WANT yo use Anki, press “EASY” always. This would give you a slack of 1000 cards or so. It’s pretty hard, but not impossible. The results would be far inferior to normal method.

No one here’s gonna laugh at your goals, or even if you fail. Just be sure to maintain your motivation even if you fail.

Hey, man! Thanks a lot for these suggestions! I will try and search about this method you mentioned.
I really enjoyed this reply of yours!
Really instructive.
No no! Not a troll here. Just someone with time to spare and a huge interest in learning Japanese haha.
I am not a complete beginner, but far from intermediate. I just finished lesson 8 from Genki 1.

I’ll go with Manan here and say that what you are suggesting is most likely not possible. 1000 cards per week would require a pace of about 140 new cards per day. I have personally used paces between 10 and 30 as I have progressed though the deck. Even when I performed the best, 30 cards per day resulted in review times between 3 to 4 hours. When I was doing Intermediate, I would spend about 3 hours for just 10 new cards! It’s not the new cards that are the problem – it’s all the reviews that it will result in.

Assuming you could do all of this at 3 hours for 30 new cards, you would need 14 hours of study per day for 140 new cards. You should however expect to have issues with retention due to the increased rate. It will also take you a while to reach such a pace for J-J cards. Finally, you will also need time to eat and sleep :)

If you still want to commit yourself to this and really work as fast as possible, what I would suggest is that you start out aggressive with the first 200 of Jalup Beginner the first day, then maybe 100 the next day and then adjust the new cards every day to find out how many you can handle. My personal guess is that you will settle around 40-60 new cards after a few days. You will have to respond immediately and adjust the number of new cards if reviews start to get out of hand. Once you reach Intermediate, in particular, you should expect a performance drop for the first 500 cards or so. Make sure you respond by adjusting the number of new cards to what you can handle.

I think it is totally possible for you to dedicate all your time for this for the next two months and make great progress. Just don’t expect to finish 5000 cards in that time. What you need to realize is that most of learners on this site are already fairly hardcore about their studies, so you should not expect to be able to outperform other power levelers by a factor of 3 to 4.

Anyway, I hope that we have not dissuaded you from attempting this. My goal at least was simply to give you realistic expectations about what is possible. Good luck in your efforts and keep us updated on your progress.

Final comment: Always fail cards that you don’t understand. You will thank me later ;)

Just a note for your final comment… For RTK cards I think this is not always true :)… I found that to keep up with reviews while rushing through RTK in 3 months I needed to use the “hard” button for failed cards. That kept my reviews down to around 3 hours a day. When the reviews settled down a little after not adding new cards anymore I started to see massive fail problems (after 3 months of adding cards and 2 months of settling down time). When that happened I started failing cards I didn’t remember and now I have kept that up with a manageable 1 hour review time for the past 3 months and my retention is much much better now!

I am not sure how well this will work for sentences though. Since for RTK each card is fairly isolated in that each has a story of its own (of course building on previously learned primitives), it did not matter too much that the retention wasn’t the best for some cards for a while. However sentence cards build much more upon each other, so having trouble understanding one card might propagate down the line to a lot of other cards as well, especially when reaching the J-J stage.

Agreed. My comment was meant for the Jalup sentence decks. The problem with not failing cards is that the cards are connected, and you need to understand each card to decipher the cards that follow.

For RTK not failing would probably work fine. You should however be aware that selecting “Hard” will reduce the “ease” of the card the same as a fail, so you will easily end up with a deck of all 130% ease after you finally do learn them. I also used the “Hard” strategy when I did RTK myself, but if I was to do it again, I think I would stick to a by the book “Fail” strategy. I also recommend against choosing “Good” when a card comes around again after a fail. It is better to keep failing it that day until you learn it. Otherwise you will just fail it again the day after… and the day after that, etc. Again you will end up with ease 130% once you learn it.

The worst thing I did with my RTK was to stop failing cards after I completed it the deck. I lost about 75% of my RTK retention over the following 3 months due to that decision.

1. Read 8 chapters of 花の慶次 -雲のかなたに. This is exciting, as I will finally be reading a manga that’s not よつばと！ or 進撃の巨人. Plus it’s from the 90s.
2. Finish Jalup Advanced (99 left) and finish 100 cards in the One Deck. Hopefully this is modest enough that the One Deck won’t completely destroy me (although it was like 5 months ago when I last attempted).
3. Watch 25 anime/dramas. aka Code Geass, One Piece, and GTO(2012).

1. I shouldn’t have been worried. Sure There was tons of weird samurai words, but I’m LEARNING. It’s awesome. And lol, I also read よつばと！ and 進撃の巨人. And 巨人 took only 2 days!
2. About 120 into the One Deck now, although about half are cards I had to create myself for vocab gaps. It’s been amazing having to make my own cards. I still have the guide of the One Deck. Although plenty cards are pretty brutal with several words that are of less priority, I still feel my skill soaring from having to parse all this complex stuff. I don’t know whether I can go faster than 6 new cards a day though.
3. 2 GTO specials, 6 僕だけがいない町、12 Code Geass, and 18 One Piece for 38 total. Think I finished my goal.

After a bit of reflection, I’ve discovered that I’ve been doing too much passive immersion and not enough Anki! So my major goal will be:
1. Add at least 5 sentences to Anki every day. It doesn’t matter where they’re from – just to get into the habit of adding things.

And some others:
2. Watch at least 2 episodes of GTO.
3. Rack up 5 more hours of ポケモン超不思議のダンジョン.
4. Keep up with Anki reviews!

I’m here with an almost-halfway-update to say that I’ve finally, finally started J-J! And after completing my first branch of 22 cards (starting with a rather innocuous sentence out of the first few pages of よつばと！) I have to say, wow. It took me almost 6 hours today to make those 22 cards, and I ended up defining all these crazy philosophical-sounding words that had basically no relation to the simple 働く I started out with. :P But I loved puzzling through all the dictionary sentences, it was a totally new experience for me and it was really fun!

I think in the future I’ll create a bunch of cards over the weekend and review them gradually throughout the week, because the process ended up being way more time-consuming than I had anticipated.

I’m going to go ahead and update this now as I don’t think the status of my above goals will change between now and Tuesday. The last three weeks have been interesting to say the least it’s also been rather difficult to adjust my schedule lately as two weeks ago I got a part time internship at a software development startup. So for the past two weeks I have been trying to juggle work, school, and Japanese with rather poor success.

1. I managed to not miss a day of anki thus far despite the schedule change!

2. I failed this goal badly not only have I not added any cards to Anki in the past week or so I have also lowered my daily new cards down to 5 as reviews were really starting to pile up. I’ve since learned doing reviews after work is a really bad idea as the reason my reviews starting piling up is because I was failing more cards than usual.

3. This goal I can proudly say I achieved and even went beyond my original goal when I wrote the above post I was only on volume two I’m currently on the last chapter of volume 9 right now. It’s pretty enjoyable so far and having read the whole series in English before it makes reading it in Japanese that much easier.

4. I failed this goal before I even started working. Not only was アリアズ＊カーニバル starting to bore me to tears soon after my above post but I also had to do a fresh install of Windows which means I lost all my save data and at that point I just said screw it. What I’ve been doing instead is playing 真・女神転生IV off and on until I rage quit (the Japanese itself isn’t too hard but like its predecessor the game can be rather unforgiving so expect to die A LOT).

5. At work I pretty much sit in front of a computer for 6-7 hours writing code which means lots of time for passive listening and from looking at my excel spreadsheet I made just for this goal I averaged about four hours of passive listening a day so far however most of this passive listening was spent listening to ソードアート・オンライン which has made me realize I really need to watch more shows and add them to my iPod as at this point I don’t think I could stand listening to another episode of ソードアート・オンライン without going insane.

1. Yes, finished intermediate! Very glad to have that done, took 6 months instead of 3 during the challenge, but it’s finished. Many of the cards I still only have a vague idea of. Will likely take several months to solidify knowledge.
2. Yes
3. Yes, but still not much audio immersion.

1. Finish Gyakuten Saiban 3.
2. ADD NO MORE THAN 5 CARDS PER DAY WITHOUT COMPROMISING IMMERSION. I will immerse, and if I find anything I don’t know, I’ll NOT add it unless it’s super important. This should reduce my new cards to ~150 per day.

1. Finished. FINISHED!!!!! I’ve finally finished the original Gyakuten Saiban Trilogy!
I’ve come a long way. I remember struggling to read/make sense of anything when I first started, but after 3 months and 3 games, this feels like leisure reading. The only downside this series has is lack of Kanji. I plan to play Gyakuten Saiban 4/Gyakuten Saiban 5/Dai Gyakuten Saiban (3 games) in the near future, but not now. I am done with this series for the moment.
2. Added ~10-15 cards/day. I feel that the number of new cards I need to add…or rather, I WANT to add is decreasing, which I believe is a good sign.

1.Yes. Started on Memrise(with a 26 day streak) but frankly I hate the design so I think I’ll stop using it after February ends.
2.Slacked off on book reading and shadowing, but managed to complete one novel.Kept up with the talking at least once a week on Skype.
3.Yes. I remember a comment on jalup mentioning audio dramas so I used those for audio immersion. Finished seven!

1. Continue Kanji Kingdom at 5 per day to start with. I expect to raise this to 10 per day in about a week when my Jalup Expert reviews come back down a bit.
2. Increase immersion and start making new J-J cards from that again. Pace will initially be 5 new per day until I have an idea what it will do for my reviews.
3. Continue with Japanese Proper Names deck at approx. 2 new per day. I can highly recommend this gem https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3885156604
4. Also continue to learn kana handwriting. No rush as I want to focus on kanji, so 1 new per day.
5. I have pretty good grammar understanding, but it is mainly based on intuition and quite vague in some corners, so I will go through some of my text books and add some anki cards to reinforce and clarify any interesting grammar points.

1. On hold for now, as I realized that it was reinforcing English words more than the Japanese relationships that I am interested in. I did keep the pace most of the month, however.
2. Highest level of immersion for me, yet, this month, so pleased with my progress on this goal. Pace of 5 new cards kept most of this month to get Jalup 5000 reviews down. They are around 150/day now, so increased to 10 per day now. I am 200 cards ahead, though, as I have been creating tons of new J-J cards from immersion and related branches.
3. Done.
4. Both hiragana and katakana mastered this month. Now I just have to make it look pretty :)
5. I dropped this goal as I realized that it was much more fun to immerse and do branches. I have been doing Jalup 5000 until this month, so I am actually quite new to this process and really enjoying it.

I have been slacking off lately and pretty much only doing my Anki reviews, while watching a few TV shows every now and again. This month I am going to start taking it serious again so I can start getting better!

1. The one thing I am going slow on is Anki, since i’m adding everything back I will stick to just completing my reviews every day on Anki.

2. At least 45 minutes of Japanese tv a day.

3. 1 hour of Japanese games per day.

4. Read 1 chapter of Manga a day.

I will use this month to get back into the swing of things and get my schedule figured out, and then next month I will start adding new Anki cards and add more immersion.

1. Read a novel! (ノーゲームノーライフ第1話)
It’s my first time reading one and it’s been slow-ish going so far, but I’ve done 80 pages out of ~270 already. I’m pretty sure I can finish it before the month is out.

2. Stretch goal: 2nd novel! (ノーゲームノーライフ第2話)
I don’t know if I can manage this one, but it’ll be nice to at least try and push my reading speed up.

1. Begin intermediate 1000. I’m going to start with 5 cards a day and see how I feel from there. From what I’ve read here it seems best to start off slow and steady, then ramp things up a bit after adjusting to J-J.

2. Add at least another 5000 words to my (approximate) extensive reading word count. I’ve tried Tadoku out this month using a combination of native material from 絵本ナビ and a few other resources here and there. I’ve found it enjoyable, and also quite satisfying to see how much I do (and don’t!) know from just the beginner 1000.

Quick Update: Life happened, and it happened hard. The combination of projects, tests, and all around tons of issues thrown at me threw me off of Japanese for quite a while (around a week) Hoping to start again today, review avalanche not too bad 200 kanji, 230 sentences. I got intermediate stage 1 earlier this month and completed it and I am still working on my own J-J cards (much easier now thanks to the first stage of intermediate) So yeah, around 80 cards until my kanji goal and technically finished my sentence goal yet I still want to continue. Immersion I realized a week ago is not what I thought it was, what I was thinking of was passive immersion. Immersion turns out to be the combination of both and I seriously lack in that. Need to fix that with the group challenge coming up.

My longest break was like 2 months. I ended up restarting intermediate but I’ve been going pretty strong lately. I think one of the keys of learning this language is being able to bounce back from these breaks.

Immersion has done wonders for my understanding and my motivation. I doubled my Anki time when I started to see results from immersion <3

My naive self could not predict the future. I was able to finish stage 1 of intermediate and some self made cards until I fell off the wagon. I made a dent in the Kanji goal but not achieved. Didn’t keep up with daily reviews either. So this month was almost a total fail except 1, but hey! Did I die? Did Japanese leave me? Am I going to suffer from one month less of progress? Not at all. This is a new month with new spirits! I got this!

1. Finish RTK deck.
2. I’ve never done much J-J even though I realize the vast importance of it. (I’m mostly too lazy to make cards.) However, this month, that’s gonna change. I’m going to add 5 J-J cards every day, not including branches.
3. This might be a bit ambitious, but I’m going to try and make the push to level 40. I’m somewhere between 30 and 40 right now (I’ll have to check), and I think I can do it if I really amp up my studying.
4. Do some passive immersion that isn’t music.

1. Recognition RTK deck complete as of several days ago; JALUP RTK mod expected to be complete today.
2. I did this every day this month, but started slacking this week. I’m going to start adding J-J cards again today.
3. I think that I can safetly call myself close to level 40, but not quite there. Doing J-J cards helped a lot. I did Test Your Might stage two yesterday, and understood about 85% of the first level 40 comprehension block, about 85% of the second comprehension block, and virtually 100% of the last comprehension block. I also tried the first level 50 comprehension block and got maybe 75 or 80%. I’m putting myself at about 38 or 39; does anyone else want to give their input?
4. Haha nope. Hopefully the upcoming immersion challenge will help rectify this, though.

4. Extras: Finish watching FMA, rewatch a J-Drama, start a KR drama with Japanese subtitles, beat Pokemon X and ORAS, play and beat Ookami, get back to playing FFX/X-2, maybe get Bravely Default or Chrono Trigger in JP and start playing those.

1. Only do Anki reviews in the morning.
2. Anki reviews must only take one hour a day.
3. Read 1 short story a week (from Japanese Classical Literature at Bedtime https://jclab.wordpress.com)
4. Expand immersion-pod with 5 mp3s from Youtube and 1 podcast from iTunes a week.

余計に: Start on doing extensive reading, a half an hour a day in the book: すごい！ホメ方（作家：内藤誼人）。

1. Start advanced deck, hopefully 180 new cards during the month (should be doable if the difficulty is similar to the intermediate deck
2. Continue daily anki reviews
3. Immersion during commuting and downtime at work.

1. Immerse and continue producing J-J cards.
2. Add 10 new cards per day to the review stack. I expect to raise this to 15 or 20 depending on how many reviews I get. I want to keep Anki review below 2 hours per day to leave room for other activities, so that will be the real limit for this goal.
3. Continue to practice kana handwriting.
4. Continue “Proper Nouns” at 1-2 cards per day.
5. Find a new way to study kanji with J-J focus.

It has been a good month with all goals met. My Jalup 5000 reviews are taking a bit longer than expected to come down, so I have kept my new card limit at 10 for the whole month. I have been producing more cards than that, however, so I am about 200 cards ahead.

Just finished the second book in the こそあどの森の物語 series, まよなかの魔女の秘密 which is a series of children’s novels about some elf/fairy type little people who live in the woods and have interesting things that happen to them. Currently in the first volume of the Fairy Tail manga and I have 5 more volumes of that on hand. Also, I’ve read a bunch of the Magic Treehouse books translated into Japanese.

1. Nope. Ended up getting sucked into Fairy Tail and watched like 200 eps of it instead.
2. Nope. Reviews were starting to make me hate doing anki so I stopped adding for a few weeks to whittle those down. Will pick this back up soon.
3. No. I did read, but not every day.

Not going to let these missed goals get me down though. I definitely continued to make progress this month, and my understanding of the cards already added to my decks has gotten much firmer. Have just about got my reviews back under control, so looking forward to massive progress in April.

I fell off of Japanese so hard after the 1000 J-J sentence challenge. So this month is going to be about picking up where I left off.

1. Restarted the intermediate deck so I’m working my way through it again @ 45 new cards per day. It’s going really well I can pretty much just click easy on most of them.
2. Read 美少女戦士セーラー⭐︎ムーン Volume 1 and 2 (I ordered vols 2-12 last week so hopefully they’re here by the end of the month)
3. I feel like I need to go back and actually study some basic grammar rules. Maybe I’ll try going through Tae Kim’s guide or studying some JLPT stuff.

It’s crazy how much Japanese I’ve done compared to what I set out to do. Or rather, how differently my goals turned out.

1. I was doing 45 a day for the first week or so, then moved down to 20 when I decided to redo RTK from the beginning at 65 cards a day (toward the end of last week I bumped it up to 100+ a day so I could finish on the 22nd). So this goal sorta changed and I finished what I set out to do.

2. I read the first volume and I’m about halfway through the second. I’ll probably finish the second and be started on the third by the 31st so I’ll count this as a win.

3. I did a LITTTLE bit of Tae Kim and a little bit of Japanese the Manga Way, but Kanji sorta took over my life this month. And honestly the little bit I did do made me realize I have more of the basics down than I was giving myself credit for.

1. I’d like to get through ~500 more cards in my J-J deck. I am at 1008 total right now.
2. Continue going through マレフィセント intensively.
3. Read one news story a day, adding any difficult words/concepts to Anki (J-J only…my branches will never end lol)
4. Go back through all the grammar videos on nihongonomori.

1. I came up a little short by only reaching 1480 cards. I’ll live lol.
2. Yeah…not getting terribly far though. That’s kind of the point of this one though.
3. One a day? ha…ha…not quite. I did maybe 3 – 4 a week. But I was reading on shasetsu land so each news story was like 3 separate articles. so not too bad I guess. the point was to just kind of get me to read more news.
4. I only went through some N2 ones, but did get through all the N1 grammar videos they had.

I ended up getting distracted by other methods of japanese immersion so I’m pretty happy with how I did this month.

1. Well About this time last year my goal was to read 1 manga. I say read 4 manga now, which will be a personal record.
2. Reach 300 cards in the One Deck, which should mean just keeping to 6 new cards a day.
3. Uh I don’t know.. 40 episodes! (I think this would be a record too)
4. Finish LOZ: Minish Cap. Started this like a year ago and just stopped playing. Should be easy now.
I pretty much always finish my goals, so maybe I’m not pushing as much as I should. This is easily my most ambitious goals, but it’s still possible.

1. Yes: ２花の慶次、１進撃の巨人、１よつばと！
2. Yes, had to switch to 7 cards a day after only adding 2 one day. Think I’ll stay at 7 a day now being more comfortable with the One Deck.
3. heh, heh: ５僕だけがいない町、１１コードギアス、３０ワンピース、５フェアリーテイル、１監獄学園、２四月は君の嘘and 2 movies:バケモノの子、思い出のマーニー。 So, 56 things.
4. Yes: I may have to avoid games I’ve beat in English in the future. It’s too tempting to skim when I know what they say already.

1. This didn’t happen, but it also never got completely out of control so that’s progress.
2. I am only 300 of 1000 so far. Gotta hit Anki a bit harder.
3. I dabbled in some dramas but didn’t get hooked on anything.
4. Nailed this with Dear Friends and 箱入り息子の恋
5. I forgot about Chi, sorry Chi.

March goals… Since February has been such a blast I’m going to set my ambitions a little higher this month, while still accounting for most weekends being occupied with social stuff and my review burden being high already. For the first 10-14 days of March I plan on adding no new cards at all in order to get the number of reviews down. So as for new cards I will only have half a month’s time to work with.

1. Keep up with reviews – as always number 1 goal. Even if I accomplish nothing else any given month I always should do this.
2. Add 100 new cards from Jalup Intermediate. This is double my goal for February, but still less than half of what I actually accomplished in February. With only half the time this is ambitious but realistic.
3. Finish Kanji Kingdom Stage 3. I will have to work for this one. I’m not sure that I can actually do this, but I’ll try pressuring myself a bit.
4. Watch 30 episodes of anime for pleasure. I don’t know if I will get as hooked on the next anime as I have been on Hunter x Hunter, so I’m setting this one low, also to make room for doing other things.
5. Watch 10 episodes of のんのんびより. This amounts to a little more than 2 episodes a week. In February I mainly watched this in the weekends since I would be less tired that way, but with much going on in the weekends of March I will probably have to watch some on week day evenings. I’ll see how that goes.
6. Do passive immersion for at least 3 hours a week. I have increased this a bit even though I didn’t completely accomplish my February goal. I managed it for 3 weeks, so I just need to get back in the game and keep doing it!
7. Read the rest of Graded Readers level 1 volume 3. It is only 2 books, so not a lot of reading and I actually don’t have anything else to read yet. I’m still considering whether to progress to Graded Readers level 2 or try something real like よつばと or チーズスイートホーム. I want to at least have something ordered before the end of the month, preferably by next week, so I can get some reading done.

Thanks for the suggestion :) I ended up ordering Graded Readers Level 2 volume 1. Then I’ll see how that goes and decide whether to order more volumes or something else. I also ordered a practice book for the listening part of JLPT N4, since I hope to take the test in December and I might as well get started on listening practice since I really suck at it. I’m skipping N5 since I did the practice test for N5 and did rather well on everything (even with very bad listening skills I managed to use qualified guessing for that part). So I expect to be able to do N4 without much trouble with my current pace (that way I will also motivate myself to keep the pace).

With this I finished goal 7 already since I also read the last to level 1 books – yay!

Only annoying thing is that my packages seems to get stuck in customs. The first 2 packages I ordered went straight through and were delivered in a week, but last time the sloppy customs workers didn’t even manage to handle my package in the 5 days they are supposed to. I’m just hoping it won’t be that long this time too.

1. I’m slacking a bit these days since I have family dinners every day all Easter. I will get all slack down before April 1st though, no doubt.
2. Done and beyond! I was doubting this a bit since my reviews have not come down as fast as I hoped, but I decided to start adding new cards anyway since that is also some of what keeps me motivated to do the reviews. So I’m right now down to 107 cards remaining of Stage 3 of Intermediate, which means I got 143 new cards done.
3. I’m behind on this. Motivation has been down a lot this month compared to last, so I’m only half-way through Kanji Kingdom stage 3.
4. I didn’t really find anything that has kept me watching a bunch. So far I have watched 7 episodes of Naruto and 11 episodes of Pokemon XY. Pokemon is relaxing to watch but also not all that exciting. I’ll keep watching Pokemon XY and probably hit the 30 episodes I aimed for before April 1st.
5. I have watched 7 episodes this month so far. Since this is what I’ll do for the immersion challenge I have already started watching more. I believe I’ll get 3 more down before the end of the month, so even though it was a slow start I’ll consider this done.
6. This one… Not done at all. The immersion playlist I had really didn’t interest me anymore and I only got around to updating it a few days ago. I have listened maybe 2-3 hours in total all month, so not too good. I think I’ll cut this goal for now since passive immersion isn’t everything. I immerse actively when watching anime instead.
7. Done. I bought Graded Readers level 2 volume 1 but has not started reading it yet.

1. Complete Anki reviews, catch up with a modest backlog
2. Finish adding cards relating to Dictionary of Basic Grammar
3. Add hiragana writing cards to Anki, nail writing the hiragana
4. I had a ‘lesson’ with a native Japanese last week – basically chatting in Japanese – I hope to have another couple in the month before…
5. Go to Japan!

Terrible month of illness, insane work, and a holiday to Japan meant little got done.
1,2,3 – no: falling behind on Anki reviews
4 – got a few hours of chatting in and this is working well
5 – got back yesterday from an amazing trip to Japan. I loved it so much. I caught up with friends I made last year and made more – giving me a compelling reason to keep studying. I was able to have some simple conversations in Japanese, and read far more signs and whatnot than last year.

1. Got through all the new cards but started slacking off on reviews these past few days.
2. Finished intermediate but didn’t start on advanced.
3. Read 名探偵コナン 銀翼の奇術師 and about 40 pgs in 人生がときめく片づけの魔法. Haven’t got back to it in a while though.
4. Finished.
5. Listened to a few audio dramas at the beginning of the month but that was it.

Kind of disappointed with the results. I’ll definitely pick up the pace next month!

1. I will finally start making my own deck this month after using premade decks since I started. I don’t know how long it will take me to make cards so I wont set a goal on that until next month when I’ve had practice making them and know how long it takes.

2.finish 50 more cards in my current deck while I start making my new one, that will put me at 2,600 cards going into my new deck.

3. I want to finish watching Parasyte and the God Eater anime this month.

4. I would like to read a chapter a day, but would be happy with just reading 2 books this month.

My main problem has been scheduling, so I am setting up a day planning today and i’m gonna stick to it this month and see how much it helps me complete things.

Planning out my study time has really helped me this month, I am currently 4 episodes away from having both Parasyte and God Eater finished, I have 2 episodes left to watch in each.

I am also at 2650 cards in my anki deck now, got to 2600 and kept going, I have been doing around 15-16 a day and will keep doing more until at least next month, then I will start on the new deck I am making.

I have also read 3 manga already this month and started reading a Japanese novel for the first time called タイムリープ.

The only thing I haven’t did a lot of this month is making cards for my Anki deck, but after a few days of trial and error I figured out a way to make them that I liked. I still need to find a way to make audio files for them, but other than that it is an easy process.

1. I only ended up making around 10 cards, but I am making them with pictures and audio and it took me awhile to figure everything out. I do have a list of about 30 or so more words to makes cards out of for next month now though.

2. I did 150 cards instead, so i’m now at 2700.

3. I finished watching both, and also finished Ace of the Diamond.

4. I didn’t read a chapter a day, but I did read 3 manga, and i’m currently 12% (according to the kindle app) done with reading my first Japanese novel

I also started playing my vita again this month so I have been playing a decent amount of Japanese games.

This month was a huge success for the first half, I was really motivated and getting everything done early, as the month went on I started slacking or I could’ve gotten a lot more done. Overall I surpassed all of my goals for the month and am happy with what I did this month.

The news target took a depressing turn with the earthquake and I eventually switched to daily updates in general, was previously following it on 2 news sites. Still I exceeding my expectations because I missed a chance to buy Stein’s Gate at a good price. Later on, I got Umineko and later Clannad in the mail. Umineko proves to be more difficult then I expected so I am reading Clannad first. Still, has been a good month of progress, but I still am not satisfied with myself.

After finaly being able to read fast enough so i can read and finish novels in a reasanable time for me I thought i put a nice Challenging reading Goal for myself for April. In The next few Days i should be able to finish the first Harry Potter Book in Japanese and I will continue it in April.

So I will try to read the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Harry Potter Books all in April. with the 4th book being pretty long and all 3 books having in total about 2200 pages i will have to read about 75 pages everyday. I hope my japanese will get a nice push from that.

Kind of Strange how fast reading Goals can change, it was only a few Days ago i finished my first Novel in Japanese (never finished one before) and I was happy to read 10 Pages every Day. And now i am Trying to read 3 Harry Potter Books in a Month XD

Kind of failed my goals pretty badly. Only mangaed Harry Potter book 2 and then lost kind of interest in reading Harry Potter. Then i started reading durarara which was a way tougher read than harry potter so it went slower, but should at least still finish the first volume this month. So at the end I read only around 800 novel pages this Month (its at least something right? XD)

At least i did more Anki cards and went from 5 new sentences a day to 25 sentences a day ^^

I’m really just going to start learning Japanese this month. For months I have been learning how to learn and falling into the pitfall of doing all my research on how to learn Japanese instead of just doing it. I have learned quite a bit and have been able to plan my next month. April and May are going to be some hardcore powerleveling months for me. Starting in June I won’t have as much time to learn over the summer but I will spend that time reviewing what I have learned these 2 months so I can go to J-J starting August.

I can be a very single minded person and have an obsessive personality which at times can be a fault but at other times has allowed me to accomplish things I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

My plans for this month is:
70 new kanji everyday through RTK and anki.
Listen to 2 podcasts of JapanesePod101 each day (1 on my way to work and one on my way to martial arts)
1 lesson of Pimsleur on my way home from work (To help practice my speaking)
Go through Japanese From Zero to learn some basic grammar
Immerse my self the rest of the day

Yes it will be a heavy intensive schedule but to be honest I used to do Taekwondo for 8 hours a day when I used to have summer vacations so I know this is very doable for me.

Good Luck, here are some tips. I am assuming that if you are able to continue this pace, it should take you 1 month for RTK, and 1 month for JalUp beginner. Tough, but certainly doable:
– Japanesepod101 has a HUGE amount of content. Only do the Nihongo Dojo series (you don’t need anything else). You can maybe try Newbie Season 1, but it’s pretty inferior in quality, and everything it covers gets covered later anyway. So my recommendation is : Newbie Season 2 -> Newbie Season 3 -> Beginner Season 4 -> Beginner Season 5. You won’t be needing anything else from that site. Keep the dialog files from the lessons in your immersion ipod, with some music so that it doesn’t get too monotonous. Slowly replace the dialogs with native media.
– Learn Kana using pictorial mnemonics. You’d probably be able to knock them out in a day. Search google for “Dr. Moku” or “Tofugu Learn Hiragana” and “Tofugu Learn Katakana”. Try to practice writing kana too.
– For RTK, Make Mnemonics, or use community story. Make every story as vivid as possible (you’ll thank yourself months later). You will be receiving 400+ reviews per day, from RTK alone, so make sure you have time to do the reviews. It won’t be an easy rise, so don’t worry too much, just keep moving forward.
– There is NO use for Pimsleur and Japanese from Zero, for someone like you who’s planning to do intensive study. Sure they both look colorful and inviting, and it seems that they would teach you a lot, but not really.
– Alternative to Japanese from Zero is “TextFugu” (if you can pay), or “Tae Kim” (free). I prefer Tae Kim because it cuts out the fluff. Use these guides in conjunction with JapanesePod101 and JalUp decks for maximum benefit.
– Pimsleur is a heavy waste of time with little output. It’s for those people who want to just “get-by” while visiting Japanese, and it creates bad habits for Japanese learners.
– If you want to speak, I think the best way is to reach level 30, and then start combining sentences from Japanese Beginner and Intermediate decks.

1. Immerse and continue to produce J-J cards.
2. Add 10 new cards per day to the review stack. I expect to raise this to 15 once my reviews come down to a reasonable level. Hopefully that will be this month.
3. Continue “Proper Nouns” at 1-2 cards per day.
4. Continue J-J kanji studies.

1. Been doing ok, lots of cards produced.
2. I actually managed to raise this to 20 early in the month, so doing really well. That pace is comfortable at the moment, so will try to keep it up.
3. Done, approx. 2 cards per day.
4. Doing well on this one. Almost done with grade 2 kanji.

3. This went better than I expected. I’ve read this advice many many times but never actually tried it as it just felt really awkward. But speaking is starting to feel more natural now. I wish I would have done this from day 1.

For the new goal I set of finishing Kanji Kingdom stage 2. I’m almost done, I have 48 left that I could possibly squeeze in before before April 30 but instead of doing that, I will take what’s left of this month and clear out my failed card pile to make room for 25 intermediate cards per day. If I don’t do this, I will need to take some time in May to catch up but that will cut into my time for JJ cards. So in other words, this goal is failed but for a good cause <3

Finished Jouyou kanji just now after 36 days of study. I’m gonna let the cards mature and begin my anki decks on the first when I don’t have 300+ cards of review daily since the big number kinda stresses me out.

1. Keep up with and don’t get lazy on RTK reviews.
2. Finish rereading No.6 novel vol 1, and get started on rereading vol. 2.
3. Continue to make and do 5 new J-J cards a day.
4. If they come on time, read No.6 manga volumes 7 and 8.
5. ジョジョの奇妙な冒険：ダイヤモンドは砕けない anime is scheduled to start airing in April. Keep up with it, and subtitles are forbidden. Rewatch episodes if you don’t understand them instead of using subtitles.

1. Unfortunately I have gotten lazy on reviews the past week. I’m going to be doing some traveling this week, though, so I’ll catch up in the airport between flights.
2. I have about 50 more pages. April isn’t over yet though, so I might still make this.
3. I did not make a single card this month.
4. I read both within two days, and will be rereading them during the manga challenge.
5. Success, and looking forward to this week’s episode.

Had an unexpected opportunity this past month to get a bunch of speaking practice, and it did a lot for my confidence in that area. I’d like to try and build on that this month if I can – just need to find more chances to do so.

Beyond that, I’d like to get through another novel (ノーゲームノーライフ第2話) and finish playing 艦これ改 on the Vita.

Didn’t end up getting to the other novel yet (because I found the comico app and got sucked into the wonderful world of web manga). Nor did I finish 艦これ改 (got a bit fed up with it for gameplay reasons and took a break). Still a very productive month overall =)

Ewww… i only read the first one and i’m probably gonna read the second and third somewhere next year… its not that its bad in fact i really like the main route its just that i thought it was 3 but turned out to be 2 stars… and i dont like to stay in my comfort zone u see

1. 15 new cards a day. This will almost get me to the finish line with the JALUP Intermediate deck so stretch goal is to do a few extra on days when I can to wrap this up by the end of April. I’ve clarified a lot of grammar points that were fuzzy to me during March, so I’m hoping this push will go a bit easier.

2. Read or play いけにえと雪のセツナ everyday. No set amounts, just getting the habit of reading every day no matter what back.

1. Not quite, closer to 10 a day most days. Also, my reviews took about a week longer to get down to where I wanted them than I anticipated so I was a week late with starting to add again. Still, happy to see forward progress and J-J definitions are really starting to make sense now, as I’ve begun internalizing all those dictionary words learned up front.

2. Did not read ‘books’ a lot this month but played a ton of Setsuna, so counting this one a success.

1.I made this what I thought would be easy with how motivated I was feeling, but just barely finished it in time.

2. This one completely slipped my mind this month, I usually check my goal list a few times a month to make sure I am working towards finishing them all, but my computer went out on me this month so I haven’t been checking and I forgot about this one. I started it today though and went from 12% to 18% so far, so i’m gonna try to get to 50% by the end of the month since there is still some time left.

3. I wasn’t able to watch this (unsubbed at least) since my computer went out, but realized Rurori Kenshin was on Netflix, so I have watched quite a bit of it instead.

4. I completed this one, and it felt nice to finally beat the game, and I bought Persona 4 Dancing All Night when I saw it recommended here and I have been playing a decent amount of it this month as well.

5. I did listen to quite a few podcasts this month, didn’t add any new series, but downloaded a lot more of the ones I usually listen to.

I fell off the Japanese wagon this month, hard. School being ultra stressful and all kinds of tests and crap really threw off my Japanese. For these last few days of March I will conquer my reviews (300 kanji 200~ Jalup&custom deck) then finally get myself on the wagon again. I can’t fall off so early now can I. And by fall off I mean fell off with skid marks, completely stopped immersion, anki, visiting jalup.
Goals:
-Conquer Reviews
-Keep conquering reviews
-Get back doing immersion for the group challenge
-Keep conquering reviews
-Finally slay RTK
-Buy the rest of Jalup once I get birthday money
-Take it slow and steady

1. Really start one (or both) of the games that I received as a gift over a year ago. These games are games I have never played in English, and when I received them they were too difficult for me to be fun. So far, I have only played games in Japanese that I have previously played in English. After the novel challenge here, and after two rounds of the Tadoku Contest, I think I am ready to tackle one (or two) brand new games in Japanese.

2. Start translating Mahou Tsukai Precure for my spouse. While my Japanese is not good enough to translate anything adult or official yet, I think it is likely to be good enough to translate Precure. This will also mean that I will be able to watch it with my spouse, with the only English I see being that which I have written.

1. I did start both games. One is ポケモン・ノブナガ野望. I was able to get much further past the place where I gave up the first time, and I made a good start. It is fun. I do not know that it is my favorite game, but ok. Just today, I tried the second game, ゼルダの伝説・大地の汽笛. Sigh! Well, I am stuck, but I do not think it is because of Japanese…I was able to follow and understand all of the instructions. Sadly, I have no hand/eye coordination, and I can not get the Princess past the guards. Still, I think that I did enough to count this goal as complete.

2. I just finished the first episode last night…and it took me forever, even though the Japanese was easy enough. Translating is hard! I am going to continue working on it, and I hope that with practice I will get faster.

3. In progress. I am only adding J-J cards (or S-J cards), and I am deleting cards with English as they come up in my reviews. I think I like it, so this has become my regular practice.

4. So far so good. It is in my Habitica Dailies list, and I have been keeping it up. I think that it is helping, so I will leave it one of my regular practices.

1. 100 new J-J cards This is low goal as I have a work class beginning of May that I need to prepare for. (to keep track of progress currently on card 180 advanced)
2. Daily anki reviews
3. Continue passive immersion while driving and down times during day

1. Done
2. Done and started on stage 4 :D
3. Not done. April has been busy. I might get around to doing them this week, but I’m not sure.
4. Not done – I started out great but the past week I haven’t been motivated at all, so not much immersion there.

I finished Graded Readers level 2 volume 1. The last book had quite a lot of text, but I got through it and it felt great.

1. Get back on track with the Anki reviews. Afterwards, start jalup advanced.
2. Finish reading 人生がときめく片づけの魔法 and starting another.
3. There was this grammar workbook I rushed through in two days. As such, I don’t believe that I wen through it thoroughly since I didn’t even check my answers. I’m going to go through it slowly and input stuff I have trouble with into Anki.
4. Audio dramas! I will get back into them.

1) Complete RTK mod deck. This should be doable as I have less than 400 unseen cards.
2. Begin J-J!! I’m a little nervous so I’ll start by adding 10 cards from JALUP Intermediate every day and if I feel I can increase later then I will.
3. Immerse immerse immerse. Watch and record new anime like I’m used to, but also shake things up a bit and try out some variety shows.

Humble goals, and I will be very happy and proud if I can mange to accomplish those three things.

Very happy to say that I added my last new card of the RTK mod deck on schedule. I feel triumphant. School became difficult but I managed to find the time. I have been delaying the start of J-J until I finished RTK so I’ll dive in tomorrow.

I’ve been doing lots of passive immersion. I have Japanese playing in the background for about 6-8 hours of my day just as an estimate. Mostly anime dialogue that I am already familiar with. Some active immersion but not much. I’m watching lots of episode 1’s of various anime to see if anything catches my attention. I think I might buy in and watch Clannad. I have also watched two episodes of 月曜から夜ふかし I understand quite a bit less than I do with anime but I think that’s important for my goals and I still enjoyed it.

Hopefully there will be more good news to come at the end of the month with regards to J-J.

So I started J-J and as expected I had some difficulty for the first week plus, and then the dreaded college finals season began and I had to stop everything but passive immersion and study nothing but English material for nearly a week. Yuck. Even had to take a week off from aikido. Today is my first day getting back on the horse and I have a formidable pile of JALUP reviews to tackle, but RTK is not that bad yet luckily. In all, April was a success though not a rousing one. My difficulty level suddenly shot up to expert and I wasn’t equipped to handle it, but things are back down to regular now so I am eager to get back up to speed.

1. Daily Anki: 10 new JALUP Intermediate 1000, 25 new All In One Kanji deck. Done before getting out of bed.
2. Create Korean-Japanese cards: spend an hour of my shift doing as much as I can. Learn 2 new cards per day after 1 week of making cards. Find a TTS for Korean.
3. Actively listen to 1 Asa no Gaijin or Nihon go no Mori video each day and then add to my immersion playlist for work. Download the audio for my immersion iPod. Also done before officially rolling out of bed.
4. Spend 50% of my shift (at least 4.5 hours) doing passive listening.
5. Intensive read 1 Twitter post per day.
6. NO ENGLISH READING. No articles or books. Devote attention to reading all of Harry Potter by the end of the month. Read every night before bed. Maybe switch to Naruto: The Last novel if I get sick of Harry Potter since I’ve already read half of it.

Seems like a lot, but the active studying can definitely be accomplished in 2 hours per day. That’s the underlying goal. I figure I just need to set a time.

Each time I complete a Visual Novel, I feel that my knowledge of Japanese improves substantially. I have so many Visual Novels I want to read, but …. life gets in the way ;_;. And it’ll get even more hectic. Here are the things I am planning to finish at minimum this month:

I’m currently making a massive audio deck with clips from as many sources I can get my hands on so I guess my goal for this month will be simple: Find Japanese audio with exact Japanese text for my little project, while still keeping up with Anki reviews. I do not want to fall behind on reviews ever again because then I just end up starting over and it’s not fun that way.
I’m really hoping my listening will improve a lot this month.

A bit late posting, but I started yesterday, so it’s all good right? I’ve been studying for the N3 as a level check, and my test book is pointing to grammar as enemy one. Followed by vocabulary, which surprised me a little, but then the JLPT focuses more on real life where stuff like 空飛ぶじゅうたん just doesn’t turn up as much as 出張…
So since I have a couple months April is grammar review month!
With a side of J-J to start preparing for a vocab month.

1 – go through Tae Kims grammar guide and make cards for all grammar points I need a brush up on. Then double check my N3 list for anything else.

2 – slay grammar cards at a rate of about ten a day. I have other decks active, so that’s enough.

3 – crawl into J-J with an “easy” card. One card a day, two max in the background by my other decks. It seems like nothing, but I’ve tried the cold turkey approach twice. It gained me some familiarity with definitions, but cost me progress as the decks crashed and burnt.

The “easy” card format is,
Front: sentence + word I want to learn,
Back: definition of the word including furigana for words I can understand with the extra support. As well as any word from the sentence that I second guessed the reading of when I found it.

Furigana for the win. I can take off the furigana training wheels later when it doesn’t feel like I’m going to end up face planted on the floor of J-J defeat.

4 – Oh and before I forget, my yearly goal of 15 books manga/novels per month is still in effect. It’s been looking like 14+ manga and one or two novels so far.

Missed registration by about 2 days. So I’ve dropped grammar cards to 5. I’ll use the time I save on reviews in the morning to read a little more instead.
I works out well, I can only follow my current book well because I know it in English. Any extra time on it is a plus.

1-fail. All of my tech chose this month to implode. Copypasta without a mouse just was not happening.
2-lowered goal passed.
3-passed. Added 2 cards for a few days to make up for missing a few days.
4- 21 volumes of manga. Two from my 積読.

April was a huge success, I plan on making this one a success too, few goals this month.

-Keep up RTK reviews and Jalup reviews.
-Minimum get through one stage of advanced, real goal is to finish it all
-Conquer the Manga Challenge
-This is a short term goal, finish my last Japanese graded readers volume before May starts. I have 5 chapters left in it so I want to finish it in order to further prepare me for Yotsuba.

This month is the last month of school so there will be a lot of stress from assignments. I hope I can get through this month with all my goals conquered! Also, May 24th is my 6 month anniversary in Japanese if that’s anything.

I have barely touched Japanese since the end of the J-J challenge, but 2 weeks ago I reset my intermediate deck and started doing that and kanji kingdom at 5 new cards a day each. The crazy thing is, after letting it sit for a few months I can now understand all the definitions pretty much crystal clear. Its like it just clicked for me.

My goal for this month is to survive finals then move up to 10 cards a day and stick with it.

I’ve been coming along at a nice steady pace and the school year is almost over. Due to school ending at the month of may, I want to position myself for a summer of ass-kicking. With that in mind, this month I want to:

-Finish JALUP Advanced (Currently have 400 remaining)
-Finish relearning the kanji (Currently at 1200 cards of an eventual 2200 or so, I’m working through a custom anki deck using mnemonics for both meanings and readings from WaniKani.)

I figure with both of those goals under my belt, my two months of summer can be for finishing the JALUP 5000!

I’ve been focusing heavily on output the last couple of months, and the results have been great, but my list of unplayed games is getting longer and I need to start catching up >_>

First up: 空の軌跡SC for PS3

It’s a pretty long game and one that I’ve wanted to play since I started learning. I’m roughly 1/3 of the way through already, so let’s see if I can finish it this month. If I do, then Star Ocean 5 is probably next on the list =)

On the Vita side, I also have to do something with 艦これ改. I took a break because it was getting pretty repetitive, so now I need to decide if I’m going to buckle down and finish it, or just move on to something else.

I started having a difficult time adding cards from Kanji Kingdom and the intermediate deck at the same time, so I decided to put off new cards from intermediate until this month was over. After I finish intermediate next month, I might try 1 week sprints where I do 25 a day advanced then next week 10 a day Kanji Kingdom.

Goals:

1. 25 cards a day from the intermediate deck. By the end of May, this should finish intermediate with a few days to spare. This is my 2nd attempt at intermediate. Life happened when I was around 100 cards away from finishing. I ended up taking around 2 months off from studying. Part of my motivation is to become fluent as fast as possible so the next random life event doesn’t knock me back years.

2. Complete the manga mayhem challenge. This will be rough, I’m going to have to use my time more efficiently to complete this goal.

3. Say at least some cards out loud while doing reviews.

4. Keep up with immersion (this was never a problem for me).

5. When I have time, add 5 a day from Kanji Kingdom. This deck is not my main focus this month, but I should still add when I can.

1. Manga challenge! Ten volumes should be pretty easy; ultimate goal is 20 or 25 volumes. I put all of the manga I’m planning to read during the manga challenge on a separate bookshelf so that I can see my physical progress.
2. Get caught up on 明けのトバリ and こえ恋 on comico; keep up with カウントダウン.
3. Continue to immerse as if the immersion challenge was still ongoing—no subtitles—and watch as much 亜人 and 黒子のバスケ as there’s time for. This month is really reading-focused, though.
4. Learn the 読み方 for all of the buttons and (unlocked) sword names in 刀剣乱舞.

Thanks for keeping me on top of things haha. (*ﾟ▽ﾟ)ﾉ In terms of J-J cards, since I’m going to be doing so much reading, I’m probably going to keep a log of sentences I want to turn into cards and work on it when I get a spare moment here or there. Part of the reason that I didn’t make any cards last month is because I was focusing on really increasing the amount of immersion that I was doing, and Anki sat on the back burner for a bit as I adjusted to that. I’ll get back to it this month, though! 頑張るわー

1. I’m working on volume 23 right now, so, success.
2. Not caught up with either because I started reading ReLIFE, but I’ve been keeping up with カウントダウン.
3. Almost done with season one of 亜人; I’ve been watching it pretty sporadically. I watched a couple episodes of ダイヤのエース and 暗殺教室, but no 黒バス. Did not ever use subtitles, so I’m doing pretty good.
4. Haha nope.

ぎりぎりできた! Life happens when you set goals been going at 2 volumes a day the past few days fighting till the end and just made it to volume 10 😊 I’ll have the rest ready and lined up for tadoku one volume a day is doable

I’m thinking I will stop listing anki reviews as a goal since it has been a habit for so long now, and goals should focus on something that moves me forward. Maintenance is a given by now I think.

1. Complete the Manga challenge! This is my primary goal and it would be a major milestone to be able to reach it
2. Get down to 150 unseen cards in Intermediate Stage 4. If I reach this I believe I should be able to finish intermediate by the end of June. Another major milestone.
3. Do 4 exercises in 耳から覚える 聴解トレーニング N4

1.added around 70 cards so yeah
2.no
3.yeah
4.its not the end of the month yet,but i’ve already read around 120 hours+ so yeah
5.read about 30 hours and gave up….i thought i have to always challenge myself and that is not wrong,but i just need to read something i really want to,not just something difficult(dies irae is top 2 hardest vn) well dies irae is what i want to read too but its not my top 20(around 50-70?) so right now i’m reading muramasa instead(top 5 what i want to read) and it’s a lot better(i mean i feel a lot better and muramasa is a better vn anyway)

1. Continue adding my own J-J cards at 20 per day. Currently at around 6200 sentences, so that should push me to around 6800.
2. Proper nouns at approx. 2 per day.
3. Finish grade 2 kanji and get to work on grade 3.

1. I got hit by Anki avalanche followed by the first sign of burn out. I think I managed to catch it in time, so about 10 days ago I reduced my daily new card goal from 20 to 10 and then 5. A bit slow for my personal taste, but as long as I am still adding, I am happy with it.
2. Done without issues. I find this deck very easy to get through.
3. Finished grade 2 and about 1/4 of the way through grade 3. Done.

I didn’t do great last month, but hopefully I can make up for it this month since I have extra motivation for a few of my goals!!

1. Finish 150 new cards in my Anki deck, that will finally put me at 3,000, which is a goal I have been trying to finally reach for the last few months.

2. Complete this months Manga Challenge!! This has got me motivated to read more this month, and even though I have never read more than 3-4 manga in Japanese in a single month, I this I can buckle down and complete this one.

3. Finish Persona 4 Dancing All Night. I bought it after I saw the article on here recommending it, and I have did nothing but free dance on it so far and it has been really fun, so I am going to go through the story mode this month.

4. Thanks to the immersion challenge (and my computer going out on me part way through the month) I have barely touched youtube last month, so I want to stick to not using it much if at all, and keep my immersion up this month as well.

And for extra motivation, if I am able to complete my Anki goal and finish the Manga challenge I will splurge and buy some Japanese games and books I have been wanting.

I’m back. I died off this website after being on here like every day and I slacked. I took a Japanese AS level and got an A grade but then I slacked and I just had the most traumatic mock exam experience ever. So I’m back and this acheiving goals thread jumped out at me. I have goals I need to acheive. Really basic ones to climb back onto the train tracks to Japanese success… and my A2 level exam in June.

1. Get all my reviews down.
2. Finish my textbook deck that I never finish
3. Start doing 2 essays a week (for the exam… I know, production at my level is just torturous rubbish and writing is what I care about least but… I must)
4. Watch a drama a day
5. Start listening to drama audios whil doing stuff again.
5. (hopefully)Start doing 10 new kanji a day.

As you can see… I’ve basically slacked on everything recently. It’s been a really shit year generally. BUT I’M BACK.

-25 new sentences every day so should be done with expert stage 1 at the end of the month
– Reading the 魔法使いの夜 Visual Novel
– Doing the Manga Challenge reading 10 Volums of Umineko

The following I would like to do but i dont know if i will Manage (and are like a crazy extend to my goal):
– Reading 20 more Volumes of Umineko (so 30 Volumes in total)
– Reading all of the Rurouni Kenshin Manga Volumes (22 Kanzenban Volumes)

Last month I finished RTK in a marathon of sorts. I’ll be starting this month’s goals on the first after I manage through the cards that I won’t be able to retain for a few days.

I have a deck from another website on Anki that goes through and gives me vocab, then gives me associated sentences to review. The deck is in 10 parts and totals nearly 4000 cards. While I don’t think I’ll be able to do all 4000 in a month’s time, I’d like to start off aiming for 2000 cards complete by the end of the month.

I think next month I’ll try starting to read some low level manga. Yotsubato and Chi’s Sweet Home look pretty low level so I hope I can handle one of those two when the time comes

Ah yes, I definitely have to study that. I’m considering Genki, but its vocab doesn’t really match up with any other course and I’d feel like I’m just doing 2 different sets of vocab at once. What would be a good alternative? Should I just go through the basic dictionary of grammar and try to improve my skills there?

Some of the basal grammar I already have down to a level closer to intuition than anything do to past attempts at learning the language (approximate sentence order, some verb conjugation though only when read (can’t output), the general uses of か、は、が、ね、かな particles, etc.) so I feel like I don’t actually need a full course on the grammar, but more of a reference that I can run myself through when I start to stumble.

If your reviews are sentences, then you will hopefully get to see different grammar in those. One way may be to read Tae Kim (www.guidetojapanese.org) alongside your vocab study and when you encounter grammar in your sentences that you don’t quite get, then read (or re-read) that part of Tae Kim until you get it.

2000 cards in a month is about 66 cards per day. That is likely to give you daily review counts in the several hundreds (probably close to 1000). I don’t want to discourage you from power leveling, but if it starts getting out of hand with reviews, make sure that you quickly reduce the number of new cards you add.

Also make sure that you keep reviewing your RTK. This is critical for you to able to retain them. I let my own RTK lapse, and it was clearly a mistake, as now I have lost most of it and have had to relearn it.

TL;DR I learned a lot from last month about learning and how to stop myself from getting discouraged by big goals and even big ‘failures’.

Ya, last month was actually a lot of a learning experience for myself, not just in RTK, but just in how to learn and do flash cards in general. I had to come to grips with sometimes getting even obvious cards wrong and not rushing myself through the reviews, while also not giving myself an hour to slowly pace my way through the kanji and then marking it good.

Generally speaking I’ve come to the conclusion that if it takes more than 15 seconds for me to figure out the kanji (sometimes I get distracted) I’ll figure out the kanji to better reinforce the thought-processes, but I’ll mark it wrong even if/when I do get the answer, which then I’ll review later in the day with all the other incorrect cards.

I’ve also had some times where my reviews were stacking up to 400 a day and I had to slow down and just give myself a few days of a break so the reviews stop piling on even though it’s kind of painful for me to not be continuing forward.

I’m definitely someone who wants to rush through learning and I’ll rush as much as I can until everything collapses. I read a great article that kind of has been supporting me though on the tidal wave of reviews anki sometimes gives you, and basically it said that if you miss some days and the reviews pile up, rather than doing 1-2k reviews, just click “good” on all of them and review them as they return next time. I haven’t had any unprecedented hiatuses yet and have studied 37 days in a row so far, but it’s nice to not have the pressure of “study every day or I’ll be buried in cards and collapse under the weight of it all.”

I hope I can achieve my goals so that next month I can see about struggling through some low level manga, but worst case scenario I take 2 months to reach 2000 cards or even 2 months to reach 1000. I just gotta remember that being “done” this deck isn’t “done” the language, and I’m as “done” with the language at 4000 cards as I would be at 500.

Sorry about the long winded reply. Just had a lot on my mind to say. Thanks for the well wishes, and I wish you good luck on your own goals! ^_^

1. Finish JALUP Intermediate. I have 300 cards left. Stretch goal: Get 100 cards into Advanced.
2. Complete the manga challenge sucessfully. Excited about this one. This will be a big increase in reading quantity for me.

Finished JALUP Intermediate tonight. Between that and stuff I’ve added from my immersion, I have added about 500 cards in the last 3 weeks. Was super focused on this, so I’ve fallen way behind on manga reading. Sitting at around two volumes. We’ll see if I can still pull it off. Definitely a power-leveling few weeks for me.

Final update:
1. Yeah, kicked ass. Added around 550 cards total for the month (Around 150 from reading). Pretty happy about this. Going to let reviews settle down a little bit and then snatch up the Advanced deck.

2. No. I read about four volumes, so quite a bit shy of the 10 volume challenge. I was very focused on anki and felt like I was getting so much out of that focus I didn’t want to slow down. Next month is tadoku contest though, so I am aiming to focus more on reading, which will help me solidify that massive month of SRSing a lot.

1. Make connections with Japanese community and culture by joining Japanese friendship group and signing up for lessons in Chado.
2. Do my Kanji cards everyday.
3. Finish my current manga.
4. Make cards for sayings and some onomatopoeia to add flavor.
5. Become better at using my Japanese keyboard on my phone.

Interesting to see what I thought I could do in a month…😂
I did the first two, which were, thankfully, the most important to me. I realized the manga was being more trouble than it was worth (right now) and switched to translating a novel with a friend. I was surprised at how many Kanji I recognized yesterday while translating–around 40%. As for flash cards–waiting on the development of my ability to write Hiragana without looking like my fingers are the size of sausages! Using Romaji on Japanese keyboard for foreseeable future. 😚 All in all, feeling remarkably hopeful!

Failed another month, ha! I’ve settled on that I need to establish a timeblock for getting work done instead of just doing my ambitions into the abyss, sooooo…

1. Two hours of uninterrupted JP study everyday starting Monday (Sunday I’m going to some local JP-study meet ups). I’m sticking with 1130 to 1330 unless I have a day shift–I’ll plan accordingly. Play passive audio during the time block.

2. During the time blocks, I will spend 30 minutes completing my anki studies: 15 new kanji, 7 new sentences.

3. For 30 minutes, intensive read a Twitter post. I’ll review these at the JP meet-up.

4. Spend at least 10 minutes watching a JP Youtube video and rewatch it before bed and then add it to my passive list for listening during work.

Being that I can comfortably read a lot of material – I have decided to make May a month devoted to acquiring new vocab and rounding out my grammar. So instead of a clear target I am choosing just pure study time hours for this month. I hope to have another 150-200 hours of study dedicated entirely to these points. With another 25-30 hours of active listening on the side – just because I should be doing that while exercising. Hehe.

While April was a month of milestones for me, it looks like I’m settling into a long grind and the beginning of the mid-level blues. My reviews piled up for a week while I was taking finals so the first goal is to really get into it for the next couple days while I have a short break and get my reviews back down to a couple hundred a day. Then after that, 15 J-J cards a day, and continue to expand my immersion pallet. I failed at adding variety shows last month, so I am going to give that another go, but if I can only maintain watching/listening to anime without subs, I will be satisfied.

Well it was going great until I had a work crisis preventing me from touching Japanese for a week. Consequently failed everything and ended the month with the same number of reviews as I started it.
The only success was I didn’t quit Japanese altogether.

1. Gotta deal with the Anki avalanche. I have two RTK decks in Anki, one for recognition, and one for recollection. I’ve been keeping up with the recognition deck just fine, but have gotten quite lazy about the recollection one. This morning I woke up to… 957 kanji reviews. This is unacceptable. I’ve managed to get it down to about 800 as of now, but I’ve got to get those reviews under control. やるしかない。
2. Part of the reason I let my reviews get out of control is because my Anki has become stagnant, which is not good. I haven’t been adding enough new cards. Obviously the solution is to add new cards. Let’s add, say, 100 new cards this month. That’s about 3 or 4 a day.
3. If the 新世界より novel comes in time, make a start on it.
4. Where do I want to be with my Japanese by the end of the summer? The school year ends in about three weeks, and I need to make a plan. ちゃんと考えとけよ。

1. After struggling with this all month and losing my motivation to do Anki because of it, I decided to delete my RTK deck and start over. This is fine, and I feel like I can do this again. 頑張ります！
2. I added about 30 cards.
3. It came in time, but I was intimidated by all of the unfamiliar kanji and lack of furigana, so have not read more than a few pages. I did get a little motivation boost, though, when I was able to understand the Japanese definition for 臍の緒!
4. I want to work on J-J this summer. Often I’ll look up a new word and understand the definition, but not add it to Anki because I want to keep reading or listening. I’m going to make a point of adding these new words to Anki even if it interrupts whatever I am doing at the moment. 今のままは満足できません！ If I’m not moving forward I’m doing something wrong.
I do, however, want to make a little progress in beginner Korean this summer in addition to continuing with Japanese. I’m going to learn Korean through Japanese, though, so it shouldn’t interfere too much.

I totally get deleting Anki decks. I purged mine 2 months ago. For my single word vocab deck, I was tired of seeing words out of context and I wasn’t interested in recall. For my RTK deck, I struggled with similar keywords and really wanted Japanese keywords.

The switch to JALUP’s modified rtk deck and the JALUP sentance decks has been amazing for me. Don’t feel bad for deleting. And actually you probably feel relieved :)

Well, I restarted RTK with memrise instead of anki, and it’s been treating me much better. I’m back where I was (~400) in under 2 weeks while moving house, and I feel like I know them much better this time around.

So. I’d like to hit 1000 by June 30, which means 600 more, which is about 20 new ones a day. I think that’s doable now I’ve moved house, although I’m not sure if my progress will be slower now that I’m encountering brand new kanji.

I also want to log at least 10 hours on FF9 (the Japanese version, of course). I’ve already played some of it in English so hopefully I’ll be able to follow it fairly well.

Thank goodness I posted this otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to come back and see it to remember my goal.

Though actually I’m changing it – I got a new VN that I’m really excited about!! So I’m playing that instead of FF9 and I’ve got 2 hours already so I want to hit 20 or so. More would be better. I’m not looking to understand everything (the bits that aren’t voiced are a bit impenetrable) but I can follow what’s going on!

First off, I need to pass my exams or I will be in a very difficult financial situation. At least the good side of this is that it will force me to study Japanese !
– I have around 300 vocab words I need to cram before the 10th, I haven’t skipped a day in Anki since January 11th so I think I’m able to do that. After the exam I plan to stop adding new vocab and reinforce what I’ve learned so fast.
– I need to practice my listening comprehension. I’m already watching some of the shows Adam recommended in his last article on the topic, so it shouldn’t be too hard either.
– I have translation exercices to study, and that’s what’s going to be a difficult goal to reach, because I HATE doing translation. Especially because the teacher gives us really boring material, and because they make me feel like it’s never good enough. But hey I gotta pass this test.

I’m stopping here or I might write a super long list and never actually do it. I’m starting my Anki reviews of the day now !

Good news ! I’ve finished my exams, I’m now waiting for the results to come, but so far I think I’ve done well ! My oral exam was half listening comprehension, half speaking about a topic picked by the teacher, and basically I was the only one to even try speaking with full sentences in Japanese, so my grade should be good. As far as kanji goes, I need to heal… I’m crazy burnt out. I’ve lowered the “new cards” count to 1 for each day, I want to still push forward, even if it’s at a snail pace, while I’m progressively getting at a decent pace with my review count. I have something like 340 vocab cards to do today, even if today’s supposed to be the first day of my summer break.

So now I need to set new goals for the remaining time of the month :
– I have 50 pages of translation to work on during summer break, I would like to do at least 10 of them this month.
– Got that BL manga that I bought last year, I know it by heart inside out but I’ve never actually tried to read it in Japanese, so I’m aiming to read 1 or 2 volumes.
– Still have to do anki everyday, now the aim is to do all my decks everyday, because my memory needs some RTK refresh, I come across vocab words with kanji that I can’t remember way too often.

Didn’t achieve my seconds goals at all haha. I kept up with Anki but I still have a huge backlog. There’s still a few days of June for me to catch up, but I’m currently moving out so I don’t think I will find the time. Oh well, it gives me something to do next month !

Okay, girl, it’s time to learn to write! So:
1) Practice writing Hiragana EVERY DAY (Yes, I am giving you no days off 😠)
2) Keep up with WaniKani reviews. Finish through level 10.
3) Continue translating novel with friend weekly.
4) Finish overview of Japanese grammar as prep to diving in to practicing it and assimilating, step by step.
Ready, Set, Goooo!

1. Well, I didn’t write Hiragana every day, but I did most days. Am through to the た line with medium speed.
2. Kept up with WaniKani and now on level 11.
3. Friend at his Grandmother’s, so no dice there.
4. Finished basic gramnar overview. Started work on Textfugu.
All-in-all, a solid B.

Thanks (or no thanks) to some unexpected health complications in a hospital with no access to any electronics to access Japanese through. No computer, no phone, and an English cable TV. I came home to about 2000 anki reviews including J-J, J-E, and RTK. I have one goal this month. Manage my reviews.

Well, I managed to achieve my only goal this month. I chiseled down my mountain of reviews and I’m atting new cards that puts me at about 200 reviews which take me between an hour and an hour and a half. After that I just immerse as much as I can. I’m at about a 4:1 ration between immersion and anki and I have lots of thrilling moments when I understand maybe a complete sentence or something. It’s a good ratio for me right now.

I have been trying really hard lately to dive into 100% japanese immersion every day. I am actually very happy to finally be able to read j-j cards with confidence without relying on English definitions so I think it’s gonna be smoother sailing from here on. So for this June my main focus is 100% 日本語 immersion to combat the mid-level blues and boost my motivation. Also I want to finish intermediate 2 and 3 before my birthday (July 18th).

Ok I’m definitely participating. I don’t want to go overboard as I really need to spend some time job hunting (looking to move).

1) Finish my beginner J-E deck. I’m at 450 now.
2) Get to 1100 RTK cards. I’m at 508 right now. I originally got to 1200 before giving up, so I’m just going over ground I already covered.
3) Have 40 tracks on my immersion mp3 player. I have 8 currently so I think that’s doable. I’ve been enjoying it and it forced me to watch Jdrama and anime (watching Playful Kiss right now, dammit why won’t she fall for Kin-chan!)
4) Get to chapter 19 in Genki 2. On chapter 15 right now.

1) I got to 855 in my beginner deck. Short of 1000 but I’m very happy with the progress. Next month I should be into the intermediate deck!
2) Got to 1059 RTK cards. Honestly that’s excellent progress for me. I’m going to lay off adding cards for a bit and then soldier on more slowly.
3) Due to some issues I will forgoe the immersion player until I can buy some Japanese content. I do listen to stuff while working, it’s just on youtube.
4) Finished this the first week. I should complete Genki but not high on my priority list.

Upside, I finished 5 volumes of manga this month! Previously I had read only tiny snippets. I am ok with my anki progress being slow because reading is so enjoyable and I am learning so much from it. And my reading pace is improving. Looking forward to next month.

Going to Japan for 2 weeks to see my wife’s family, so looking forward to that although may limit the number of new cards so I have low goals on new ones this month.
1. 100 new J-J cards (to keep track of progress currently on card 400 advanced)
2. Daily anki reviews
3. Continue passive immersion while driving and during times at work that allow me to use headphones
4. Finish Yotsubato volume 2.

I am still a bit burned out, so I have focused on just doing my daily reviews and adding the planned (reduced) number of cards. This has worked OK and kept the Anki load acceptable, but I am still hoping to get past this hit of the blues soon. On the plus side, I can as always feel measurable improvement. Adding fewer new cards has made it more obvious how much improvement I still get from drilling reviews.

last month was No Good,gotta do something for my progress!
1.10 J-J cards/day. man i’m lazy
2.Read Read and Read,Believe in the power of Reading!!

i somehow just abandoned my RTK decks again(this is like my 3rd time for this)i’m not going back to that now,i found the kanji from 1-2000 to be relatively easy since i see them everyday,the kanji from 2000-4000 tho…

So far finished the rest of Yotsuba to the 13th volume. I wont be able to touch Doraemon I’ll leave them all for next month and now just trying to see how much of Nozaki-kun i can squeeze into the final days

Following up on Manga Mayhem last month I have named this month ゲーム月. I have ordered a Nintendo 3DS and Pokemon X. So my immersion this month will focus around playing Pokemon. For anki studying I will take a break from sentences and let my review count come down. Instead I will focus on adding cards from kanji kingdom. If I get bored without new sentences I might end up start in advanced, but the plan is to start that in July.

1. Clock in at least 10 hours of gaming. That is around 20 minutes a day and should be doable.
2. Finish kanji kingdom stage 4, that will be less than 10 new a day. I expect to get longer than that but don’t want to burn out before I reach my goal so it’s set a little low.

So those are the goals for June. Feels doable and still like progress.

June have been a mess of busy, vacation and absolutely no motivation. Only yesterday did I manage to get my reviews down to 0 for the first time in 2 weeks.
I managed to clock 5,5 hours of gaming, which I’m quite satisfied with even though it doesn’t complete my goal.

I didn’t finish kanji kingdom stage 4 either. Only about half way.

So all in all not the best month. I hope to regain some motivation by starting up Jalup Advanced this month.

Last month was successful except for manga challenge so here goes my goals this month

-finish advanced, stretch goal finish 3 stages of Jalup expert
-watch an episode of doraemon everyday, I need to step up my immersion
-finish yotsuba! I have 5 volumes left so it’s doable
Since school is almost over, it would be great if I can power level this month and finish half of Jalup expert. Hopefully I unlock the key to immersion this month.

Hi, this is my first post here (wonderful website, by the way). I recently had an unpleasant realisation that I made very little progress in the last year, so I have decided to kick things into gear again with a healthy dose of public accountability.
1. Get through the last 3000 cards of my Anki backlog
2. 1000 new cards over the month

1. All done. Feels good to have that out of the way
2. Only got about 600 cards
I ended up being swamped during the first half of the month with other commitments, so I didn’t quite make it. But I’m pretty happy with how much I got done in the second half.

This is my first time joining this monthly “challenge”.
So anyways here are my goals for June:

– Reading all 13 Volumes of よつばと！
– Finishing Jalup Advanced (still missing the final 250 cards)
– Getting to card 2500 in the Anki Core 10K deck (currently sitting at around 1880 or so cards)
– getting my 方法 reviews below the 500 mark (been hovering at about 1000+ the last two weeks or so)

Optional Goals
– Reading through しろくまカフェ (if I have some spare time after going through よつばと！
– Watch through as much チーズスイートホーム (wanted to try out 日常 but let’s start it off with something simple)

I just like having extra sentences and some additional vocabulary to be honest.

Plus you can still apply the J-J method by using a japanese online dictionary to look up the words if you don’t know them (you can also edit the cards so you get rid of the english translations and add in the japanese explanations – haven’t done that up until now though, should probably apply that some time soon!)

– Reading all 13 Volumes of よつばと！
->highly overestimated how much time I spend on reading this manga. Currently stuck midway through chapter 4. Gotta wrap it up in July.

– Finishing Jalup Advanced (still missing the final 250 cards)
-> Done! Also started doing the first 60 cards of “The One Deck” so I’m looking good here.

– Getting to card 2500 in the Anki Core 10K deck (currently sitting at around 1880 or so cards)
-> Just made it to card 2300. I’ll probably slow down on this one in general because the vocab you learn in this one is rather weird. There’s some words I never saw despite reading through NHK Easy news every day, manga and playing japanese video games.

– getting my 方法 reviews below the 500 mark (been hovering at about 1000+ the last two weeks or so)
-> Currently sitting at 400 and something. Gonna try to push it lower seeing how the day isn’t over yet. Glad to see that I got my reviews finally under control!

Optional Goals
– Reading through しろくまカフェ (if I have some spare time after going through よつばと！
-> since よつばと！wasn’t finished I didn’t get around to this one either.

– Watch through as much チーズスイートホーム (wanted to try out 日常 but let’s start it off with something simple)
-> I only got to like episode 9 or so. However, I did read through some of the manga and got to finish chapter 16.

Summary: I focused way too little on the goals I actually wanted to achieve.
That said, I don’t feel too bad since I did a lot of learning outside of those goals and, most importantly, I got my reviews back under control (that alone took waaaay too much time). So now that I have to deal with way less reviews than usual I should be able to do all the missed out reading in July.

All in all I didn’t accomplish everything but I’m still pretty pleased with how this month went.

First year of graduate school is over, so I have time for hobbies again! Whoo!
June goals:
-Get my reviews under control.
-Get through card 500 of Jalup beginner. Stretch goal: Get through card 750 :D
-Read the first two volumes of よつばと！
-Pick up some new reading materials when I’m in Seattle next. (More よつばと! probably)
-Quick blitz through Genki I. Shooting to get through the whole thing, will be happy for chapter 8.
-Read at least one NHK easy every day.
-Watch some amount of TV, no subs.

I’ll probably only do half of these, but any amount of studying I can do outside of my normal daily research will be great.

This is my first time commenting here but this seems like a fun and worthwhile venture~ (っ˘ω˘ς )

My goals for June are…

* Read through at least two NHK Easy News Articles a week
* Learn at least 14 N4 Kanji a week (2 a day)
* Blog on アメバ at least once a week
* Dedicate one day a week to communicate ONLY in Japanese
* Watch a least one Japanese Youtuber/Blogger/etc a day
* Discover my new favourite Japanese TV show/drama

Having just finished JALUP Beginner,I’ll take a minute to let my RTK and sentence reviews phase out before moving on. I’ll make the switch to J-J this month, and to help myself out I’ll keep my other goals nice and friendly.

* Keep up to date with Anki reviews (RTK, I’m looking at you)
* Read manga at least 3 times a week
* Play Tales of Xillia at least 3 times a week
* Watch two episodes of Gintama daily
* Get in some passive immersion every day at work (depends on meetings etc.)

I made the transition to J-J, and the only goal I didn’t keep up to date with was the manga goal. I used to read manga during my commute, but now I’ve watched unsubbed Youtube videos instead. It’s immersion too, so I won’t count it as a fail. I also started watching unsubbed J-drama and have rewatched some anime unsubbed. Anki is up to date, although the amount of new cards is on the low side at the moment.

I think I reached the mid-level blues, after 2 months, maybe sooner than I should have. Anki suddenly feels frustrating, can’t even think about immersing. A week ago it was okay. My main goal is to get out of this frustration. Been studying for at least 3 hours/day, maybe that’s why. Also, I’ve been cramming kanji like a mad man, 600 in 10 days. Now letting my reviews calm down and will start going in a more of a normal person’s pace of ~15 a day.
My goals:
1) Get through the anki reviews every single day no matter how painful it is.
2) 1000 Kanji (Currently 600)
3) 650 New vocabulary cards
4) 1 Hour a day of listening/watching
5) 1 Hour a day of reading

I hit the mid-level blues a little early too. I just slogged through day after day until I had added the RTK mod deck. But there is a HUGE feeling of victory and reward once you finish. I’m still in mid-level, but I’m not really in the blues. Once you finish adding new kanji cards and creating new mnemonics, your anki time will decrease drastically. You become familiar with even the most difficult kanji soon after that and reviewing takes no time. I don’t know what method you are using, but this was true for the RTK mod deck, and I assume it is also true for kanji kingdom. There is also the added bonus of having had so many kanji under your belt, you can now recognize and get a vague idea of meaning for words you have never seen.

June so far is succesful, with my current pace I should finish Jalup expert stage 4 in ~5 days. So if I manage to finish that in time here are my goals:
-Finish stage 5 of Jalup, real goal is finish all of jalup
-Read 31 news articles for the news challenge
-Go to Little Tokyo in LA and talk with some natives
-Keep up watching anime/drama everyday

this month might not have a ton of progress due to going to LA for the whole month but I will try my best to achieve these goals.

Granted I haven’t lived there in 10 years now, but the entire time in lived in Torrance I always found it a much better place to find Japanese natives than Little Tokyo. Torrance is the home, or maybe in one case former home, to all of the big Japanese car companies US headquarters and there are still a lot of native speakers that get shuffled in and out of there. It may have changed after all this time, but right before I moved to Japan there were still plenty of restaurants around there where it was somewhat hard to order if you didn’t speak Japanese. Starting at the Mitsuwa Supermarket around lunchtime should yield the best results.

(Living in Torrance with two Japanese speaking roommates, one American and one Japanese, was a huge factor in me moving here. Both of those roommates now live in Osaka.)

Thanks to my work in June I’ve already set myself up for a successful July. I’m very steadily and routinely completing my reviews and getting lots of good immersion. There are a couple things I want to do this month though.

1) Most importantly I want to try and increase my presence in both the line group and on jalup.com. I’m a little anxious about this because I feel like I don’t have that much insight to offer at this relatively early stage in my journey, but I always notice that in school I tend to excel in the classes that I participate the most in. I’m thinking that this will be true with Japanese too.

2) I am going to increase my J-J card limit to a higher number. My difficulty level has decreased to easy over summer break and I want to take advantage of that. I still haven’t decided but I’m leaning towards 20. Not quite power leveling, but also still casual enough that I don’t have to decrease my immersion.

3) Expand my immersion. I started watching dramas last month and it was eye opening to see the difference in conversation patterns. I want to continue that and continue to flirt with variety shows, but they are still really challenging for me to enjoy.

This month was a technical success ~*The best kind of success*~ I think I made commented on one post on Jalup, which is one higher than last month so… not the kind of presence I had imagined, but a technical success. I also had one conversation on Line that was really helpful and inspired me to up my new J-J cards to 25 a day. It’s significantly harder than the 10 per day that I did in June, but I am loving the challenge and I am loving the idea of getting out of the middle levels that much faster. Immersion was great until about a week ago, and then I fell off a bit. Towards the first 3/4 of the month I was immersing about 4 hours a day. I’m down to one hour for some reason right now, but I am going to rectify that in August. I am making my way through the “85 best J-Dramas” list here on Jalup and other recommended anime.

I should be finished with Jalup Beginner just in time for July. But I want to aim low and be conservative with my goals since life turned topsy-turvy in the last week. So, I’m going to say that I want to finish the first two sections of Jalup Intermediate and get through all of the Graded Readers at Level 1.

I don’t want to set too many goals now, because I still don’t know exactly what will happen in July work-wise but :
– I HAVE TO reduce drastically the amount of backlog I have on Anki. I currently have 338 vocab cards and 418 RTK cards to review. I feel guilty every time I look at these numbers.

Then, once I have crushed those numbers, I’ll buy the Intermediate deck and work on it all summer.

I think I’m going to continue to soldier on. While I will not meet all of my goals that I set for June I have been super happy with my progress as of late. It’s like a flip switched that’s made native (shonen/shojo) manga really enjoyable!

Assuming nothing life changing is going to happen this month (it might… got a few interviews to deal with), then my plan is:

– Review all Anki cards due daily (been lagging on this)
– Add 250 new cards in RTK
– Get to 150 cards into my Intermediate deck
– Read 10 manga volumes. Currently reading ベイビーステップ and ワンパンマン, and 俺物語! is coming in the mail Tuesday :)

1) Only once this month did I not go through all my due cards- otherwise, complete!
2) Barely squeaked by at maybe 260 cards? I crammed a lot this week to make up for days I didn’t add cards.
3) I’m at 152 cards right now and I’ll add another 20 today. Happy with that.
4) As of today, I’ve read 22 volumes of manga and I’ll be adding 2-3 to that total before August 31st.

The first 100 cards of J-J were the worst, but now that I got it over with things got easier. I’ve also lucked out and figured out how to buy manga cheap ($1-$2/volume) and found some series that are at my level.

June was good :D I (expectedly) only did about half of the things I had planned on, but June isn’t over yet! I successfully finished Beginner decks 1 and 2, which was rough on some poor importing on my part. I haven’t been listening to much, nor watching much… But I was on top of my reviews.

For the rest of June:
-Actually read some よつばと！
-Keep doing new cards (~30 a day)
-Keep doing Genki exercises

For July
-Add another 500+ cards (the rest of the beginner series)
-No reviews due before bed!
-Finish exercises in Genki I
-Read at least one manga volume
-Finish watching Sailor Moon Crystals (no subs)
-More NHK Easy news. It feels great actually being able to pick out phrases and kanji vocab.

For July:
1) Finish second half of learning to write Hiragana.
2) Finish Season 3 of Textfugu.
3) Read Hiragana texts every day aloud to increase speed.
4) Finish through level 12 of WaniKani.
5) Speak Japanese 3 times a day for at least 5 minutes.

Maybe I need t try Nozaki-kun again, but I found the manga really difficult for some reason. Which is sad because I love the anime to bits and I need to know what happens. The art is so amazing to boot!

Hi everyone, this is my first post here.
My goal for July:
-finish Jalup Advanced part 1 (high goal: finish part 2 as well)
– Step up the immersion
– Try reading a bit
I have a lot of work, and family commitments, so I’m not sure how this month is gonna go.

How do you deal with Anki on the road? (Stuck in a car for 14 hours a day, driving for the most part?)

Ah I’m not a truck driver, sorry for the misunderstanding, I just have family that live very far away from each other. The 14 hour-driving was just for a few days. Now I’m back home, and I can go back to my routine.

As for my progress this month so far:
– finish with Advanced 1
– have not read at all
– didn’t step up the immersion

I’m so exhausted, between work, personal stuff, and Anki, I don’t know where to put more Japanese.
I think I was too greedy. I increased my Jalup new cards per day, because I was frustrated with my lack of progress, and now Anki is taking too much time.

Having finished intermediate, i though my understanding would be better, but even one star Jdramas are still very tough to understand…
I think it is because I don’t do immersion enough.

June has been great for the most part that said it’s pretty obvious that I’m not going to fulfill one of my goals and that’s reading through the entire よつばと！Then again I compensated that with reading a lot of NHK Easy News, some チーズスイートホーム and I’m currently working on a translation of オメガラビリンス so I don’t have to feel bad.

Anyways the goals for July:

– Wrap up よつばと！(This time for sure!!!!)
– Translate the entire Plot of オメガラビリンス (this one might be a bit tricky since I don’t know how long the game is but I still think I can do it!)
– Complete the first 250 cards of Jalup Expert (I’d love to go to 500 but we’ll see)
– Finish Genki 2 (I sadly was too lazy to complete that book after all this time)

I got out of school for the Summer, So I’m gonna start learning Japanese during my Summer break. I started on June 28, 2016, currently relearning Hiragana. My knowledge of Kana is pretty decent but it’s been a while, so I want to refresh my knowledge of Kana before I move on to other things like Kanji and Grammar.

This will be my fourth attempt at learning Japanese and I will definitely succeed in not only learning but mastering this language. But we all have to start from somewhere, so I’m keeping my goals manageable and obtainable. Wish me luck and I’ll update everyone on my progress at the end of July.

HI, I failed at achieving my Japanese goals for July. Started out good relearning all the main hiragana. But after that I stopped. I had trouble sticking to my study’s on a regular basis and if I had continued it would have gotten worst.

So I’m going to take a break for a couple weeks to figuring out my problems, make a good schedule and maybe get a better computer. I finally know how important it is to start out on a good note in order to master Japanese. So don’t think of this as me giving up learning Japanese just yet but me figuring out my problems so when I attempt Japanese again I will succeed.

1. 5 new J-J cards per day. Burn out hit last month, so keeping ambitions low for this one.
2. 1 new Pronoun card per day.
3. (optional) Continue with grade 3 kanji.

Still having the blues, so keeping goal 3 optional, as I realistically won’t make much progress there in my current state. Not too worried, though, as this level of intensity is not causing any further burn out and still means that I am making reasonable fast progress while I wait the blues out.

1. Keep up with カウントダウン、明けのトバリ、こえ恋 on comico in addition to catching up on スーパースターは眠れない。Find at least one new comic to read.
2. Make up the remainder of the J-J cards I didn’t add last month; about 70.
3. Read volumes two through four of 刹那グラフィティー! Really excited about this one since I hadn’t thought I would be able to get my hands on them. A friend who was in Japan for a couple weeks kindly picked them up for me.
4. Complete first part アイドリッシュセブン story mode.

1. Didn’t find a new comic to read yet since I’m super picky, but I reread つくもつくつくつくもつく and part of 菜の花ボイズ. I’m almost caught up on スーパースターは眠れない、but the story isn’t deep enough to keep me super engaged. Kept up on other three comics.
2. I downloaded Manan’s deck and have been working through that at a pace of 5 cards a day in addition to adding some cards to my personal deck. Combining those, I added more than 70 cards.
3. I was able to meet up with my friend, but she forgot to bring the books. （ ; ; ）Hopefully I’ll be able to get them from her next month!
4. Complete.

Low goals as have difficult certification test to study for at end of this month.
1. Finish stage 2 advanced (should be easy, only need 20 new cards)
2. Continue daily anki reviews
3. Immersion during commutes, downtime at work.

1. I decided not to start any new cards since I was overwhelmed with reviews and wanted to build consistency. I’ve missed a few days but I feel much more committed to doing anki, especially with this focus app for building a forest!

2. I’m lazy and just opted for podcasts with the immersion ipod. I play the Naruto radio and KLK drama CDs in my car most of the time. I’d like to have all of the KLK drama CDs and more scripts to read.

3. Nope!

4. I kinda stopped once July 15 hit but have been entertaining other English media. Gradually weaning myself for August.

5. Noooope. Didn’t even turn on the PS3.

Didn’t meet all my goals but I’m pretty satisfied as far as Anki progress goes. I’m trying to stop putting so much on my plate and just focus on consistency and focus… AND FUN!

1. Keep Anki reviews at zero.
2. Learn to write hiragana
3. 4 new cards from Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar per day
4. 4 new cards from Minna no Nihongo vocab per day
5. Slowly working through Nekopara vol. 0; aiming to make 4 cards per day
6. After 2, going over Jalup Intermediate again. I never got totally happy with it. I am going to try writing out sentences and I will focus on understanding the definitions rather than just the sentences. (I am fine with the sentences, but the definitions are still not crystal clear to me).

Scrapping the Minna no Nihongo vocab. I was using a pre-made Anki deck which was just single words. I found it boring and unhelpful.
Enjoying everything else. Nekopara Visual Novel is the first serious immersion I’ve tried and I’m loving it. Finding it much easier to pick up vocab in context – both sentence and plot context – than the stale textbook lists.

1. Yep
2. Yep
3. Yep, finished. It’s great to see that fat book on my desk and know that I know everything in it.
4. Abandoned
5. Yep. First serious engagement with funbun and enjoying it.
6. Going well. I made a new deck with definitions on the front. I am finding this useful and it is solidifying my comprehension of definitions.

Good month despite a holiday in the last week. I finally got my mojo back!

June was not an impressive month… I wrote somewhere else that I would take the challenge of finishing Advanced in 4 months. I’m not all that optimistic about it right now, but I will try anyway. I’ll set the goal for July low to get a chance of getting my pace back up. And then I’ll have to up the pace later on.

1. Add 150 new cards of Jalup Advanced.
2. Immerse in anything for at least 3 hours a week

My immersion goal is set very low since I haven’t got anything I enjoy overly much right now. So I’ll aim at “some is better than nothing”.

I already went past my anki goal for July which is great. I had a late start but have managed 10 cards per day even on the weekends. So if the next few days goes as planned I will finish Advanced stage 1 by the end of July. This have made me more confident about reaching the 4 month challenge on Advanced. Even more when combining with the August challenge of 350 cards.

Immersion have been quite slow. I have put a few hours in Pokemon X but nowhere near 3 hours a week and I have done nothing else. However since my phone is set to Japanese I got Pokemon Go in Japanese and I did spent quite some hours on that. The amount of text in it is limited though.

I tried changing it a couple of times with not much luck since it was difficult to understand everything and most of the time I use my phone I actually want to just be done with it. This time was around the end of Jalup Intermediate. My amount of immersion is rather low, so my level compared to a lot of other learners here is somewhat lower.
So I had almost 1000 J-J sentences under my belt and I still don’t get everything. Most of the time I just wing it :) navigating facebook, text messages and phone calls is rather easy even though you don’t completely understand what is going on. The toughest time was when the Facebook Messenger app decided to implement text message handling and kept asking whether I wanted to try that new feature out. I didn’t understand what the heck it was talking about and just kept postponing the decision. When it finally forced the setting on me I figured it out alright and also found the setting to turn it off.

Thanks for the detailed reply! Sounds a lot like when I tried to switch my iPad to Japanese when I started beginner haha. Random prompts everywhere, being whisked away to random screens. I had no idea what was going on.

I just restarted my studies on Tuesday, so I’m starting fresh after a year away. One-hundred and fifty cards into Jalup beginner so far, and planning to finish it on or near the end of the month. I’m averaging around 50 cards a day at the moment.
I’m also just starting up Kanji Kingdom for the first time. It’s definitely weird using that compared to RTK, but I think it’ll be better in the end. The previous two times I attempted Japanese I averaged around 50 kanji a day which lead to total burn out eventually, so I’m trying to take it a bit slower this time. Aiming for around 500 or so this month. I read Manan’s making a master story, and it’s got me pumped. It also inspired me to start using Tae Kim’s app to supplement my beginner’s deck Grammer to hopefully prepare me a little more for intermediate.

1. So about a week after I wrote the post I realized with work picking up, and my brother being in town finishing all of JALUP Beginner was a bit lofty. I decided to finish the first 500 and save the second half for August.

2. 500 kanji has been accomplished.

3. Definitely haven’t studied Tae Kim enough, but the little I have read has definitely cleared up some confusions I had.

Here’s what I wrote down in my study journal (includes the August challenge goals):
– Get to 500 J-J sentences
– Read my J-J reviews aloud when at home
– Get to 1650 RTK cards
– Read 10 manga volumes (My favorite part of my goals :) )

My strategy: While I love the JALUP Intermediate deck, I find the J-J cards I make for myself to be much easier to review. So to get to 500 J-J cards, I should probably have around 50-100 be from reading.

I’ve also realized how important it is to finish RTK as fast as possible, so I will be focusing really hard on making a big dent. The faster I’m done with RTK, the faster I can go in J-J.

I apparently have the memory of a goldfish as I was confident I could keep my studying pace while going on vacation to my parents’ house. I barely did anything (which was the point, in retrospect), so I lost the last 1.5 weeks of this month studying wise.

Got to 500 J-J cards. A big glut of new cards at the beginning of the month made up for not adding any at the end :D
Read J-J reviews about half the time. I would stop reading them if I was tired or stressed.
Got to 1410 RTK. I’m definitely slowing down on new cards here but I’m fine with it. It keeps me sane.
Read 10 volumes for sure. Mostly 君に届け

My goal is to decide what language to study. Let me explain:
Japanese:
I love Japanese. I currently know quite a bit of grammar, just not much vocab. But my (Chinese) wife hates Japan, so I have to study in secret. Watching anime is only possible when she’s not there and my daughter is sleeping or with her. Which isn’t very often.

Chinese:
Apart from English, my strongest foreign language. Also, I live in Shanghai. But the language just doesn’t sound good, all media gets censored and isn’t very good in the first place.

Korean:
I only dabbled in Korean. Sounds better than Chinese. Some dramas are quite good. But I don’t have a passion for it like I do for Japanese.

Can anybody help me? At the moment I’m not getting better at any of them because I’m changing my mind almost every day.

To me it sounds like your passion is with Japanese and you are going to need that passion to make it through the rough spots. However I do not think it is a stable situation to study in secret only when your family is away. Having the support of your family is important when things get tough.

As I see it you have two choices:

1. Talk to your wife and get her to understand and feel your passion for Japanese. As a couple you need to be able to trust each other and respect your differences. It is okay that she dislikes Japan and you will also have to accept that as part of her. But she should also respect your passion and be able to support you even though she does not want to be involved with it. Talk about it, learn something about why she has such a dislike for Japan and try to figure it out together in a way you can both be happy with.

2. Option 1 is no doubt the best solution however since I don’t know you or your wife there might be any number of reasons why you do not want to go through with option 1. Before you read option 2, make sure to ask yourself why you have not chosen option 1 and be honest. It may be tough, and it may be some difficult conversations to have, but when you get through it option 1 will be all the better for it. But if you are sure then here is option 2: Give up on Japanese. Accept that this is a passion you need to put away and that will not happen. Sometimes life is tough like that. Be clear about why you are doing this, have a good reason. That reason is what you can use when you have to push through difficult times with your new language where you passion is not as strong as it was with Japanese. Look at the pros and cons for Korean and Chinese and how each of those will affect your life, feel in your heart which one you might end up passionate about and then make your choice.

That was just my thoughts and you can use them or throw them away. Whatever you choose, good luck :)

I tried talking to her more than once. She just shuts down and if I would keep pushing we would have a huge fight. She knew how I felt about Japanese before we married. I mean, we BOTH were studying Japanese at the same university. Then we got married. Suddenly everything Japanese was evil. Anime are for children and I have a mental problem if I want to watch them and so on. I know a lot of Chinese people hate Japan for what they did in the war, but back in Germany I had some Chinese friends who were studying Japanese and liked anime. My wife was just studying Japanese as part of her degree and had no other interest in Japan. But she never told me how she really felt. She even had Japanese friends.
You don’t know how angry it made me seeing her talking to and laughing with them, while at home telling me how bad the Japanese are and how I can’t study it.

Then I made the decision to stop learning Japanese for the sake of our relationship. My other major was Chinese and we were planning to go to China anyway, so I thought I just forget about it and try to shift my passion to Chinese. I like studying Chinese because I like 漢字. The media and, as it turns out, most of the people are not really compatible with me. What think Mao really destroyed the culture. I found some music I like, I even can watch the often cringe worthy TV series and enjoy them somewhat, but every few months I miss Japanese too much and download a load of anime, drama and learning materials. Then I replace them with Chinese stuff.

In the last few weeks my longing for learning Japanese came back again. I stumbled over a Korean drama I really like at the same time, so I thought ‘Why not learn Korean? The grammar is similar to Japanese, the language sounds quite good and what I know and saw about the culture seems quite okay.

My daughter is 16 months old and I’m taking care of her. So my time is limited. If I keep switching and having doubts it leads to nothing. So I have to decide what to study now and what do put on hold, at least for the near future. I realize this is not the ideal place for talking about this stuff, but in real life I know no one who loves a language or is passionate about language learning in general.

I don’t expect any of you to have an answer for me, but just talking about it already helps.

Most difficult situations don’t really have an answer.. Not a clear and straight-forward one at least. Talking puts things in perspective which is always good.

It is always easy to say what to do about these tough relationship-issues, but never quite as easy to actually get it to work. Anyway. What you might want to try is to diffuse the fight before it starts. Try to get to understand her feelings and make it clear for her that you want to understand her. That you are not trying to make her look like a “bad-guy”. Tell her that it would make you happy if she would try to understand you as well.

And just in case there should be any doubt, liking anime doesn’t mean you have mental issues. It feels like undermining real mental health issues to say something like that :/

If you guys are not willing to talk, it will create a wall. Try to make things as transparent as possible. In a relationship, partners have no authority to order each other. Talk to her again. DO NOT GET ANGRY, even if she does. Talk to her until you are satisfied. Make it clear that you are not attacking her personally. This is the woman you’ll spend the rest of your life with, get to know her better :).

I don’t know anything about you guys, so this might not apply to you. Anyways, that’s just my 2 cents.

I’m lucky in that my wife is supportive of my studies, but we had (have?) a similar battle over another issue, so I definitely understand what you’re going through here.

There are many possible reasons why her tune suddenly changed. I doubt she ever intended to mislead you, but all the same the “rules” got switched around midway through your relationship, and you’re now left to deal with some very understandable disappointment and perhaps even resentment.

There are two things you need to do-
1: Do your best to understand where she’s coming from. I of course don’t know anything about her, but my guess is that she feels like if you’re going to spend the time and money to learn a language, it should be Chinese. You live in China, and I’d imagine she has to carry a lot of extra burdens because of your current lack of Chinese proficiency. She may also be worried about the future – what if something happens to her? Would you remain in China without her? Would you even be able to if you tried? What will that mean for your child who’s going to grow up there? Or maybe this isn’t even about her own feelings – what if her family finds out you chose Japanese over Chinese, would they take it badly? It could be her family already has issues with choices she’s made, and is constantly give her grief about them that you never see, and she’s just trying to prevent a situation where yet another source of “shame” is piled on top of that. From her perspective, she could understandably feel like you’re being selfish about this (even though your desire to follow your passion is entirely reasonable!).
2: With the above point in mind, decide whether or not Japanese is something you’re willing/able to let go of, or if it’s something that’s truly important to you and that you’re likely to harbor resentment over. If it’s the latter, you need to be prepared for some serious relationship strain in the short term, and you need to talk it out – even if it takes lots of little talks/fights over many months. I’ve only had one such conflict with my wife so far, but it stretched us to the breaking point. It’s a really awful feeling – but depending on how strongly you feel about this it may be necessary. Just make sure you’re honest about your own feelings, and very, very considerate of hers. Do not under any circumstances attempt to invalidate or downplay her perspective – she feels the way she does for a reason.

If it comes to it, try to figure out what *specifically* is important to her and accommodate it as best you can. Or if you can’t, offer her some other compromise of similar value. For example, would it make a difference if you offered to devote time to studying *both* Chinese and Japanese? Obviously that would be very taxing (especially while also having a baby to care for), but only you can decide how far you’re willing to go for this.

That’s definitely a tough situation. I’m not married personally so I can’t help much there, but it sounds like Japanese is the language you’re passionate about. I feel like if you just give it up forever you’ll always regret it. Hopefully you and your wife can have a talk and come to an understanding. Japanese is much too big of a task to keep it secret, and it’s not really fair to you.

Were you the person who asked about switching to Korean on my post a couple of months ago?

Time to throw in my two cents. Though I’m not married, I was in a similar situation to you. I’m an American-Born Chinese, and I spent three years studying Mandarin before quitting and starting Japanese.

With regards to Mandarin:
1. Be honest with yourself. Obvious, but important.
2. Follow the media. The reason I didn’t like Chinese was that I didn’t find any engaging media, and the reason I love Japanese is that I found good media.
3. Don’t study Chinese for the kanji. If you really like Japanese, just study it.

I don’t have much advice with regards to your wife. All I can say is that when facing a difficult decision, you are never forced to do anything. The only question is whether you can bear the costs of your choice.

Also, if you’re willing to indulge me, learning Chinese is still on my ‘maybe eventually’ list, but I never got into the media. Could you explain why the media isn’t very good?

I did the first 500 Kanji of RTK for July, and I feel I can safely ramp it up a little. I would love to do 30 a day for around 900, but I think I’ll stick to 600 so 20 a day.

Keep studying grammar. I’m doing decently well with grammar so far, but I feel I only know it in the anki cards, and I can’t always utilize it when I see it out in the real world. Hopefully with enough exposure things will just stick more, and the hazey feeling will go away.

I only started back up on studying Japanese around July 7th so I should probably not worry so much.

So, with a couple days before the closing of the month, I think I can safely say I won’t be achieving my exact goals.

I currently have 190 cards left of JALUP Beginner. I signed up for the 400 J-E challenge, so, I’ll definitely be finishing up 90 of those cards before the end of the month, but that’ll leave me with a 100 card spill over into September.

I’m proud and disappointed at the same time. I had some rough days this month, BUT, those exact rough days were the ones that I would quit reviews, and quit studying Japanese on my previous attempts, so, the fact that I was able to push through this time was great. I’m the furthest I’ve ever been in sentences, and Kanji, so that’s cool as well.

On the Kanji front… Ouch! I only did about 200 of my 600 goal. After slogging through 200 to 400 reviews a day, and then learning some sentences, I found myself pushing Kanji to the side. I’ll be taking October off from sentences once beginner is complete, so that will hopefully give me some quality time with RTK.

I will improve my consistency, focus and enjoyment with Japanese via reading tweets and Kill La Kill script book and maybe guide book; complete anki reviews every day and learn 5 new J-J cards and 10 new kanji cards daily; I’ll stay linked to my immersion ipod filled with Kojima Hideo’s podcasts and Japanese Listening Advanced while playing drama CDs in my car; and I will power level August 24-31!

I will also be reading aloud for 20 minutes per day (details listed there) and rotate podcasts weekly to prevent boredom. Anki will be completed in 30-45 minutes every morning. I will intensive read and study one Tweet per day at noon and read KLK content extensively in the evening around 7 or 9 PM.

I will collect Japanese Listening Advanced scripts and audio and review the scripts if I get curious enough since I have a heavy enough load as is!

August goals… I signed up for two of the August challenges so those are definitely on my list. I don’t think I will put any other goals on my list since 350 J-J cards will be tough enough as it is. I want to focus my energy towards reaching that goal and anything else I do will be nice extras.

1. Successfully complete this month’s challenge. I already read all of my sentence cards out loud, so I’m going to read ハリーポッターと賢者の石, which I’m about 90 pages into already.
2. Continue to work through Manan’s deck at pace of 5 cards a day.
3. Get caught up on ジョジョの奇妙な冒険：ダイヤモンドは砕けない anime; finish 残響のテロル; keep up with バッテリー and チア男子.

Not really a goal, but I’m going to be in France for part of August, and apparently there’s a Book Off in Paris that sells Japanese language books. I don’t know what to expect, but I’m really hoping I can find time to make it there!

1. Failed.
2. I was not very consistent with Anki this month, so failed.
3. I’m caught up on ジョジョ and finished 残響のテロル, but intsead of バッテリー and チア男子, I decided to watch 不機嫌なもののけ庵 and 僕のヒーローアカデミア. I’m still working on the latter, but am caught up on the former.

As for Book Off, I purchased the first volume of ワールドトリガー, which I was familiar with but did not know much about, and a series I had never heard of called この音止まれ. I also got my hands on my first physical J-J dictionary, which I’m super excited about. It’s nothing fancy, but I’ve found it quite helpful in understanding several words that I couldn’t grasp from Weblio or Goo.

– Reach 8100 cards by the end of August. (at 7500+ now so 20 per day should be fine)
– Play more on my ps vita: フリーダムウォーズいいだな、字幕までがあるぞ。
– Watch more Japanese stuff.
– Read more Japanese stuff.
(sorry these aren’t specific, I do so much immersion I’m not sure how to measure it – there’s just a general sense of doing “more”).

The biggie:
– Meet up with Japanese people every week. Let’s face it, I consider myself conversationally fluent, but damn my speaking needs work :).

P.S. Peeps. I’m almost there. 3 years doing Jalup and Ajatt. 2300 Kanji, 3500 sentences, 4000 MCD’s. 850+hrs logged in Anki. At just 20 cards per day I’ll reach my super goal of Over 9000! by the 18th of October (my 25th B-day). I’ll have over 10 000 by the time I take the N1 on the 4th of December. Next year I move to Japan. Sorry about posting this all here, just wanted peeps to know that this is possible. Work hard and steady, drop the subtitles, have fun, and its truly, truly possible to become fluent in Japanese.

I wouldn’t worry too much about the MCD’s. I found them really useful for learning grammar and seeing how words are broken up into morphemes (small meaning units, like 物 or った).

The big draw back is that its easy to make small mistakes in the beginning when making cards, meaning they are harder than they need to be. I got burnt out a couple times from making a note with only one word clozed in the whole paragraph. If I forgot what the surrounding text (context) looked like I wouldn’t know what word it was (there’s a ton of 物 words for example, so _物 could be anything!).

They’re a good tool though when used properly, but aside from grammar cards with English translations (which any level person can do), I’d leave them until your advanced.

1. Success, at ~7100 sentences now.
2. I decided to drop this deck, so no new cards and will just be reviewing what I have already learned. These are not proper sentences, so my retention rate was simply way too low and the deck was frustrating me. I will use proper sentences to learn pronouns going forward instead.
3. I did okayish with this goal. I managed to immerse on 80% of the days in the month.

As a bonus, I managed to complete most grade 3 kanji, which was a goal I had been pushing for months. I am quite happy with that.

1. Production of Japanese Verbs. Using ‘The Handbook of Japanese Verbs’
(a) Get good at production of all basic conjugations of all verb classes
(b) Work through their sentences
2. Continue reviewing Jalup Intermediate definitions. I will step up the rate to aim for ~200 total reviews a day.
3. Continue working through Nekopara visual novel at ~4 cards a day.

– Do ALL of my Anki catch up (around 500 cards including all four decks)
– Make a habit of reading NHK Easy every day

Using my whole lot of downtime at work :
– Review grammar from this year with the みんなの日本語中級一本冊
– Read at least two Japanese books (unfortunately not in Japanese) to prepare my litterature classes
– Do the 50 pages of translation for my history classes
– Review the last 200 kanji in RTK, because I realized that I skimmed through them so fast to finish the book that they didn’t stick as well as the others

1. Complete this month’s challenge. Let’s do better than last month!
2. Read: 鬼灯の冷徹1-3; 進撃の巨人：悔いなき選択 1-2; 刹那グラフィティ 4. I finally got the books from my friend, which I couldn’t do earlier, and have already read all but the last one.
3. Continue to work on personal translation project: finish ch. 5 and 6.
4. It’s not until November, but study for the Japanese Subject SAT. I’m feeling confident, but it never hurts to prepare.

1. Nope.
2. Read half of them.
3. Finished 5; almost done with 6. The pace I’m working at is perfect.
4. Pshh I got a perfect score on the practice questions on the Collegeboard website, so I don’t think I need to study explicitly for this.

Hey!
Last month I wrote about how I love Japanese but my wife doesn’t let me learn and so on.
I just want to say thank you for your replies. I was at a low point, but now have calmed down and decided to stick with Chinese for the time being.
I changed my attitude towards the language and found some books and TV series I enjoy. I realized that somehow I seem to have grown quite fond of the language. I have been learning 20 new words (in sentences, of course) everyday.

So my goals for this months:
1. Continue to add and learn 20 sentences every day
2. Watch at least one episode of a drama per day
3. Finish reading 猫城记

I hope Adam doesn’t mind my writing about Chinese. It’s just that the Japanese learning community is much friendlier and more active than the Chinese one.

I’ve been failing so much at my goals! I’m always trying to do too much, so I’m limiting this as much as possible.

I’m currently level 32. I’m gonna do the Anki group challenge and learn 10 new kanji cards and 5 new Jalup Intermediate cards each day. I’ll spend more time with immersion and update my iPod weekly on Tuesdays.

As far as active learning, I will study Japanese Learning Advance scripts each day as that audio along with Kojima’s old podcast is on my iPod. Every 2 days I will learn a new JLA script extensively and then intensively.

I want more anime radio/drama CDs to listen to in my car. Other than AmazonJP, anybody know where to get some? It’s a goal to buy at least 2 more for the month and maybe find the scripts.

2. Resources:
– Waking up early to complete the Anki Zero challenge will be a huge asset to getting all of this done
– I have ~150 manga volumes lying around unread, so I will just pick from what I own

3. Game Plan:
I think just continuing what I’m doing will get me quite far. I have some fine tuning to do but things are really looking up. I’m also going into a very light season for my work over the next 3 months which will hopefully translate to less stress and more capacity to learn new words and grammar.

Also, tangentally related but I need to track my eating and eat healthier again. Eating healthy, especially lots of fruits and vegetables, really keeps my brain sharp and my self-discipline high. I lost over 50 pounds in 12 months because of it, but I’ve slacked for the last 4 months which has stalled my progress. Time to put my foot and get back on track… which will have the added benefit of improving my Japanese studies.

I think it’s important to talk about failures, so I will bring up mine:
1) Fail – I reset my intermediate deck. But it’s working out so much better for me so I don’t really consider this a problem. I hope to finish the first 1000 J-J cards by the end of November
2) Fail – Read 2 volumes. Which I’m fine with, considering I felt like I was about to quit Japanese for good. Thankfully that didn’t happen.
3) Success, by accident – Found an anime I liked on Crunchyroll and I watched about 20 episodes of it in a week. Oops.
4) Fail – I actually suspended a huge amount of the cards. I’m not ready to give up on RTK, but it really does slow me down and is a huge demotivator. I’m going to take it slow and keep up what I have. I will finish it, but I don’t mind taking a long time to do so.

I came into this month SEVERELY demotivated, and I studied maybe 10 days out of the whole month. I was actually pretty mad at Japanese to be honest and its trickiness and general difficulty. And the growing late Anki reviews weren’t helping me at all. But just as suddenly as the demotivation came, towards the end of the month my interest in Japanese came back and my desire to study was revived.

Going through about a month of barely studying at all made me rethink what I need. I dumped the things that were hindering me (resetting my J-J deck and suspending a lot of my Anki deck), and I was able to find things I enjoy. And luckily a manga I had been dying to get came out at the end of September, which I was able to read in an evening. It was really realy nice to read something without having too much trouble, huge motivation boost.

1. 5 new J-J sentences per day.
2. Learn the last 30 grade 3 kanji that I am missing. This is a fairly simple goal, but it should give me some breathing room for reviews to die down once complete.
3. Daily immersion.

1. Done
2. I ended up doing 2 new kanji per day, so I finished grade 3 and started making my way through grade 4 as well.
3. I didn’t exactly do this daily, but pretty happy with my level of immersion this month.

7. New goal: shadow a little bit every day. I’ve started off shadowing あめんぼの歌。Once I get comfortable (or tired) I’ll find other stuff to shadow. Speaking is the one thing I’ve neglected the most, but there have been countless times when I said to myself, you know I can understand that conversation over there but if I join I’d have to use English. Maybe it’s time to fix that?

Things went extremely well. I am finally back in the game. I had to take a detour though. I think I’ve hit a brick wall with anki, I just can’t stomach it at this point in time. Luckily, I started shadowing anything I could find, including a textbook I bought years ago and never used. I’m finally making progress again. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into anki but I’m not gonna force it. At any rate, I’m finally back on track.

3. Methods
— I’ll have about 100 cards to finish of JALUP Beginner, and I’ll try to hammer those out in a few days. I just want to be able to say I’m done with it! Try to do 20 to 30 Kanji a day from RTK. Read Tae Kim’s grammar guide as much as I can

Also, keep up with reviews everyday for the challenge, and also so I can focus on the hell that will await me with switching to J-J in October. I don’t want to be bogged down with unnecessary reviews.

Hoping to finish JALUP Intermediate either tonight or tomorrow so it seems like a good time to reassess in time for September.

First couple of weeks of September:
– I will go over anything from Intermediate that I didn’t quite get the first time round and cement it in place.
– Go over some stuff from Tae Kim that I seem to have become a bit rusty on.
– Practice reading and understanding longer sentences which currently hurt my soul if I try
– Catch up on anime
– Relax and let Anki reviews settle down.

Second Half of September
– Complete Advanced Part 1

Resources:
– Anki
– Tae Kim

Strategy:
– Get up early, brew up some strong coffee and smash out Anki reviews quick smart, so I can spend the evening doing whatever I want: reading Tae Kim, learning new words, watching anime etc.

1. Finish JALUP Advanced (Just started Stage 4) and start doing my own sentences for the first time.
2. Write on Lang-8 at least… 12 times. Giving myself a little bit of wiggle room without a whole lot of pressure.
3. More immersion. Cut out as much non-Japanese as possible (I listen to a LOT of kpop)
4. I don’t know that I have any hard goals in terms of what media I want to consume but I want to play Pokemon X again in Japanese and actually get somewhere in the Sailor Moon manga

1. Get to 607 in my review of Jalup Intermediate.
I didn’t go pure J-J first time round (I cheated) and although I understand the sentences I don’t understand every definition. I am going over it again, being strict, and giving particular focus to understanding the definition sentences.
2. Casual progress through Handbook of Verbs
3. Build up concentration span to 15 minutes of focus before a break.

I’m only 12 days away from adding the last of my RTK cards. My goals are:
●Finish RTK and do all my reviews
●Complete all new and review cards for the Nihongoshark version 2k deck
●1 hour daily of Japanese for Busy People
●Expand my immersion Playlist. I mostly listen to jrock and drama cds
●Get through at least the fist volume of 黒執事 that I bought. I’ll have some other manga coming from Japan as well. I also have the ハイスピード light novel coming but I think it’ll be too difficult at the moment.

It feels really worth it. A couple of the ones towards the end are pretty commonly used so I don’t even bother with a keyword because I already know words that use them. The primitives are more simple too for a lot of them. I think for me the most important thing about RTK has been that it gives me confidence to tackle Japanese text without being as intimidated.
Before I would study in retrospect really unefficiently. I would mine my then textbook (Japanese For Busy People) for sentences but type them out in all kana. It made vocab harder to remember and did nothing for reading real Japanese text. I shifted gears to just conquering RTK while doing Core2K if I had time and felt like it. I also completed reading and doing the excerizes for Tae Kim part 1 and began working through part 2. Ive since switched textbooks and use Japanese For Everyone. A lot of it is review now but its a lot more comprehensive and teaches multiple uses and ways to say certain things.
Its crazy how having some guidance from your site and also Nicos site over at Nihongoshark has changed the way that I study and my life really. A couple of months ago I was so aimless and now I feel like I make real progress day by day. :)

Damn, that went nowhere near expected… Suddenly life happened and instead of getting rid of my anki avalanche it just got worse. I am around 900 pending reviews right now and it terrifies me every time I look at Anki. I’m still going with the strategy of lowering my review count every day and for 2 days I have managed that now, so yay for that.

A lot has been going on the past 3 weeks. I’m trying not to end up in a blame game with myself and simply let myself get back into the game. First step is managing the anki avalanche.

I haven’t added anything to anki lately, it’s become a serious road block for me. But instead of just stagnating and not moving forward, I’ve switched to shadowing and textbook work. I’m still doing my reviews, just not adding anything to anki yet.

So after Adam’s recent post in shadowing I thought I would give it a serious try. I wasn’t making any progress with anki as it really just demotivated me and I didn’t want to do it at all. I started by shadowing some nhk easy articles, it was (and still is) pretty tough to keep up but I definitely see improvement. I’ve also started using a textbook I bought years ago and never used. It’s mostly review and reinforcement at this point, but I am picking up vocabulary here and there. I’m also shadowing the white rabbit graded readers I have. It’s kinda cool because the more I read them the more I understand. Every once in a while a word I reviewed recently, suddenly pops off the page and the story just kind of clicks into place. I’m FINALLY back in the game. I’m not at full speed, but I’m definitely at a sustainable pace.

1. Finish 1 chapter a week of my textbook I bought 2 years ago and never used. Each day of the week, shadow the CD for that chapter.

2. Use the workbook for the textbook. Writing is extremely painful at this point, but I’ve noticed it has helped me remember things, so I’d like to improve it.

3. Do one chapter a day of the ‘big name language product’ I bought. The dialogues are pretty short but I’m picking up vocab here and there.

Did pretty well with my goals. I didn’t complete the challenge though. One of my favorite actresses started a new drama and I cracked like an egg shell. However, I watch way more unsubbed then subbed (don’t mind me alleviating my guilt).

1. Complete the October 2016 Challenge: Slaying English Subtitles.
2. Go back and complete the old Jalup Group Challenge 6: Manga Mayhem.
3. Reach 0 anki reviews every single day.
4. Do at least a little bit of everything every day (MINIMUM: 5 new sentences, 1 new kanji chain (usually 3-4 kanji, in Kanji Kingdom), 5 minutes reading, any passive listening, 20 minutes active watching). I know these are very low but as I’m still just getting back into learning japanese, my main goal for now is to do stuff everyday and mostly to not quit hehe. And again, those are just minimums; there are days in september that I spent 10+ hours on japanese.

-Resources you will use-

1. Any sort of variety shows, a couple seasonal anime and maybe 1 J-Drama. I will post in better detail at the end of the month to see what I’ve done.
2. I’ve listed that in my post on the Manga Mayhem post; basically finish 花君と恋する私 and start ポヨポヨ観察日記.
3. The decks I am currently using are Kana Conqueror (I only get like 1 review per week but still want to mention it), Kanji Kingdom & JALUP Beginner. I am gonna finish JALUP Beginning probably in the first week of October, though, so I guess I will start JALUP Intermediate at that point. Unsure of how that will go pace-wise so we will see!
4. Well, I’ve mentioned the Anki decks and the manga already; for active watching like I said it will be variety shows mostly, with a bit of anime and J-Drama. For passive listening, I have a lot of anime audio on my phone so that’s what will be used.

I also have a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of things, here’s what the september one looks like: https://i.imgur.com/AYpQJ3l.jpg I will post what the october one looks like at the end of the month. All that I need is for it to have no blanks at all, but my secondary goal would be for the total to be higher in october than in september.

Apparently the last point didn’t write even though I did write it? well eitherways, pretty much, I HAVE to get a job this month so it’s a bit hard to plan without knowing what kind of schedule I’ll have but I will do my best haha

1. I have completed the October 2016 Challenge: Slaying English Subtitles.
2. I have NOT completed the old Jalup Group Challenge 6: Manga Mayhem. I have read 花君と恋する私 volumes 5-6-7-8-9-10, and then got a job and haven’t managed to figure out a good time management system for myself yet.
3. I have done all of my reviews every single day!
4. I have NOT done a little bit of everything every day.

I kind of took a break from Japanese this month, which ended up being a good thing – the fire is back in my heart to study Japanese and I’m really excited!! I’m amazed honestly, since I was pretty much ready to give up on Japanese 2 weeks ago. I think my brain just needed some rest.

However, I want to keep my goals simple for thix coming month as I catch up a bit on Anki and refocus my efforts:

1) Get to 800 in J-J sentences (I reset this deck at 600 sentances, so this would just be catching up).
2) Either watch or read something for an hour daily..
3) Anki to 0 daily.
4) No new RTK, unless I really want to. I’m finding learning new RTK kanji is killing my will to do Anki and Japanese in general, so I’m putting it aside for now. I will keep up with the reviews though.

I’m really pumped :) I think finding that even after a short break my Japanese has stayed the same level (or even better, since I’m not super stressed out). Being able to understand what I’m reading and watching is a real high!

Also, if I find I have fulfilled my goals satisfactory, I will get myself a one manga series I’ve been eyeing up at the end of this month. Not sure which yet but I have a few ideas…

It’s early but y’know what, I’m going to report on this because MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

1) Done, hit 831 as of today. Feels amazing, considering I totally wiped this deck at the beginning of the month, and I can see a drastic improvement in my Japanese already. Second go around really helped me cement the words I was having trouble with (mostly around “vague” words like situation, thing, etc.) and as I got along the Japanese definitions have become easier and easier to understand. Within the next week I’ll be in the Advanced deck ^^ so close to level 30!

2) Pretty much achieved. There were a few days when immersion was not as planned, but I got some new knitting projects to do and things are back on track. I find watching things a whole lot easier with knitting to do.

3) Didn’t get this one, but I was on vacation with my friends for 4 days this month so there was a reason for not getting all reviews done. I need to stop procrastinating during the day, there were a couple days that I just waited until 11pm to do Anki. NOT a good idea.

4) Ended up restarting my RTK deck for like the 3rd time. I could not bring myself to do all the backed up reviews, and from what I’ve learned about myself I need to go slow with adding cards to my RTK deck. I’m going through at 20 cards per day and then I’ll slow to 5-10 cards per day when I feel like it. It’ll be slow, but I’d rather be slow than extremely frustrated. I think RTK is amazing but I just can’t power through it like I can with vocab cards.

:D I’m super happy with my anki progress, and I honestly can’t wait to see how far I get in November. 頑張ろう！

I’ve been struggling a lot commiting to do something Japanese every day despite September’s Anki challenge. I think this is mostly because I’m feeling overwhelmed by everything that comes with one’s senior year of high school. I’m stressed about college applications and what the future is going to hold for me, and as a result have not been focusing on Japanese nearly as much as I would like. I usually can get through all my Anki reviews on weekdays, but on weekends I don’t even touch it. I’m not going to and I don’t want to drop regular Japanese study through Anki, but I’m almost completely unmotivated to add new cards. Honestly, I’m not sure what to do. My reviews are in the hundreds right now.

This month’s goals:
1. Finish ch. 6 of translation project.
2. Watch バッテリー without subtitles. If I end up not liking it, watch ユーリ On Ice when it starts airing instead.
3. Get Common App essay written. I’m going to write it about Japanese, but I’m not sure where to start. My current lack of motivation is bleeding into this a little.

1. I’m super close to finishing; just the sfx and three or four lines of dialogue left. I’ll be done before the month is out.
2. I haven’t started バッテリー, but I’ve been keeping up with ユーリ on Ice and 刀剣乱舞花丸 just fine.
3. I finished the essay, got it corrected by a bunch of people, and am ready to submit it to colleges! I wrote it about my Japanese journey, and the self-reflection involved in the process has helped me remember why I’m studying Japanese. I’m getting fired up again! I’m in the process of reviving my habit of daily Anki, and am rereading the first No.6 novel right now.

I’ve got one more episode to go off One Week Friends and finished Yotsubato!
I also redeveloped some passion for Anki, and so far have added about 400cards this month. I probably just about finish Advanced Stage 4 by the end of October, which is great.

Some thoughts:

Watching One Week Friends with no subtitles was an interesting experience. There were times where I really didn’t understand much at all – I think because of how fast they speak – which was disheartening, and a bit of a challenge for me to overcome. I hope other people struggled at the start as well, and then improved? But there was also plenty that I did pick up, and I think/hope I’ve improved. So i’ll find a new series and keep going.

Relistening to episodes needs to be foregorund for me… I tried to do so whilst doing work or study, but I think I get very little benefit from it. Conversely, listening whilst I am walking to work, waiting for the tram is immensely helpful I think.

Reading Yotsubato was really good. I’ve just about doubled the speed I’m reading at compared to the start of the month, and I’ve not started on Doraemon. I’ve got my kindle set up for amazon.jp, and theres so much out there to read I’m really excited. I’m keep to get onto real books asap, and have ordered a couple, but that may be a little while of yet. Still clinging onto those pesky furigana.

I’m still lacking behind on kanji reviews, but I managed to get my sentence deck under control. So part succes on the main goal.

However I am very proud to announce that I finished Jalup Advanced yesterday!!! This has been a tough last part of the journey but I did it and I’m so happy about it.
Beginner in 1 year, Intermediate in 6 months and now Advanced in 4 months! I will be focusing a lot more on immersion going forward from here but will probably start on Expert with 1-2 new cards per day just because new cards keep my motivation for finishing reviews up.

1. Anki. Every day. No compromise on this one. Get written kanji reviews down to 0 (currently at 444) and proper noun reviews down to 0 (currently at 161)
2. Order the first three volumes of ダイヤのA, and read as much as I can if they come on time.
3. Keep up with ユーリ On Ice and 刀剣乱舞花丸.

1. I zeroed my reviews every day until the Thanksgiving holiday hit. To be fair I had/have a lot of major college/scholarship application deadlines this month and those have taken priority over Japanese.
2. I read the first one, but the second one only came yesterday. I’ve started the second one but am not finished yet.
3. I got bored of とうラブ but have been keeping up with ユーリ!!! on ICE with no problem.

2. Resources you will use
A. RTK mod, my own brain and less of kanji koohii (my brain tends to turn off when I use other people’s stories)
B. Jalup Intermediate
C. Podcasts.
D. Go to language exchanges here in Melbourne, make Japanese friends. Voice chat online with people I already know.

3. Game plan/strategy
I have recently obtained employment in Japan, starting from the 15th of December, so that’s fueling the motivation.
A. RTK, I’m doing about 200-250 a week at the moment, so if that continues I should finish relatively early in the month, leaving me to focus solely on sentences.
B. Sentences, if I can manage an average of 14 a day for the month, that will get me halfway through Jalup Intermediate.
C. For immersion, I already have a bunch of podcasts that I really like loaded up so it’s just a matter of pressing play more often. I’m set up to easily download new episodes. I don’t have a computer at the moment so watching things (and ripping dialogue) is too difficult.
D. There are a number of language exchanges in Melbourne, I’ve been to a few already. It’s a good way to meet Japanese people in your own city! How keen they are to speak Japanese is a different story though…

Things that will make it difficult to achieve these goals:
Work up until I leave on the 15th of Dec will just get more and more. Lately I’ve had a lot of free time. It’s going to take a bit to adapt.

1. Complete all reviews daily
2. Get to 1500 J-J sentances (plan to be a 900 sentances by 11/1)
3. Watch 40 episodes of anything (20 minutes long)
4. Read 10 volumes of any manga (or equivalent… reading so many webcomics right now)
5. Get to 500 RTK
6. Listen to 1 hour of immersion at work on days I’m in the office

My medium term goal is by to get to 3000 J-J by February so I just need to keep on track :)

Game plan: Do some new cards every day. Wean off listening to English videos during work. Also, I need to put on some distraction blockers as I’ve been slightly addicted to just browsing the Internet (in English) in the evenings eating up my precious Japanese time.

1. Didn’t always, but much better than it has been.
2. I am at 1410-ish today, and maybe will do a couple more tomorrow. I fell short here but I’m perfectly fine with that as I finally defeated the first 1000 J-J sentances!
3. I watched 82 episodes of dramas. 27 hours of TV. I actually just finished Ultraman Mebius today (at a whopping 50 episodes!) and I don’t know what to do with myself, easily one of my favorite TV shows ever. Can’t wait to rewatch this next year and see how far my Japanese has come (and probably cry again over the ending… ;_;)
4. I read mabe 5 or 6 volumes of manga, but I got through half a novel and I think the watching more than makes up for the immersion I lacked in reading.
5. Not achieved, but I realized that if I don’t want to hate RTK I have to take the slow road. No point in pushing myself soo hard on it.
6. I generally got this done. Some days was 0 hours, some days it was 5.

:D I’m actually estatic right now… seriously getting through 1000 J-J cards was huge and it feels like the hardest part of studying Japanese is over. I still have a loooooong way to go though!

Now if only work will stop having things that stress me out so I can learn more new cards every day :)

1. Done.
2. Done.
3. Best month, yet. Many hours of passive immersion and 30 minutes of manga reading every day… so done.

I found out this month that I now actually find seinen manga easier to read than shounen manga. I find that they tend to use more natural language and that the lack of furigana actually forces me to work harder to recall words while reading. As a result my comprehension has gone up dramatically the last few weeks.

I’m going to get back on track for learning Japanese since I have had the most chaotic summer and early part of fall I have ever had. I had some amazing opportunities presented to me and I had to make a lot of sacrifices to do them but am so glad I did. Now that it is somewhat over I will be getting back in the hang of things so my goals will be somewhat small.

1. Get 3 more levels in WaniKani this month.
2. Add 10 cards a day to the Jalup beginner deck. Should put me at almost 500 by the end of November.
3. Go through at least two episodes of the Nihongo Dojo series on Jpod101. maybe more on weekends if I have the time.
4. Active listening immersion for about 30 minutes a day. I went through two seasons of Jpod101 already and after each episode I put the dialog in a playlist which is at about 30 minutes at the moment and I listen to it once a day.

I would do passive immersion but to be honest I want to learn Japanese but it is not the number one priority for me. I know its important but I will be putting it off since the opportunity cost isn’t there for me. I much rather listen to podcasts on economics (one of the majors I’m working on) than listen to something I can’t understand.

I really wish there was more hours in the day since I currently work full time between two jobs, practice martial arts, working on getting my bachelors in Economics and Actuarial Science, and now have taken up learning Japanese. Let’s just say my social life has gone into the toilet…

I also want college football to be over since it is messing up my Saturday schedule since its hard to get anything done with it on…

Well this months goals went down the drain again. I should complete goal 1, 2, and I have done decent on number three but I have completely fallen off the wagon on JALUP beginner.

It started well and then I injured my left knee which has had three surgeries and so I was on pain pills for awhile and that made me miserable since I wasn’t able to do martial arts for 12 days.Then the following week I got a 30 page essay assignment on Monday that was due Friday so that took up most of my time. Then last week my anki messed up and audio on all my cards and then I had to uninstall anki and re upload the deck and that killed the motivation I had going for me.

Same as last month:
1) Add 100 new J-J cards from expert deck
2) Read 3 manga (actually 3.5 as need to finish manga from last month)
3) Watch 8 new TV episodes
4) Continue daily anki reviews down to 0.
5) immersion as job allows. Have gotten better and using headphones at work when I’m doing something else on the computer and not in front of the public.

1. Reach 0 anki reviews every single day
2. Do a little bit of everything every day (new cards, reading, watching, listening) I had trouble with this last month, which leads me to…
3. Manage my time better. Not sure how I’ll do that yet but what I do know is that I will try to find a way to put my alarm AWAY from my bed, forcing me to get up in the morning to turn of my alarm. That way, at least, I should get up when I need to.

Well I’ve managed to always get up on time, but spending that extra time on japanese is still a struggle… I am going to have to make some deeper, more fundamental changes to myself if I ever want to stop this “start and stop” thing that I have with all of my passions

1. Make 1,000 jp->en sentences with Adam’s guidelines in mind, around 600 more sentences left to make
2. Start on the main 10,000 monolingual sentences using Adam’s Branch Annihilator and Goo Dictionary

1. Read 3 new manga (likely ドラえもん）
2. Watch 8 new dramas (likely finish up プロポーズ大作戦 as have 7 episodes left + the special, as long as I can find all the episodes on youtube otherwise have to try something else out.)
3. Add 100 new cards (finish up first stage of expert, then start the theme language cards)
4. Anki each day to zero and continue immersion during down times during the day.

1. Get to 2250 J-J cards
2. Continue to add new RTK kanji at 5 per day
3. Watch 40 episodes of anything
4. Read 2 novels or 10 manga or equivalent (manga novelization ftw)
5. Do RTK vocab reps in the morning

Mostly just continuing what I’m doing. I have to make sure I keep going to bed early, as I really do feel much better when I put myself to bed by 9-10pm. Also, most of this has to be done before I go on vacation towards the end of December- since I will have no will to study. Looking forward to my reviews dying down over vacation though.

I’m not new here technically but I am new to actually bothering to learn Japanese (used the methods discussed here to improve my Portuguese).

–Specific goals–

1. Going to go back and complete the old Jalup Group Challenge 2: J-E Sentence Samurai.
2. Reach 0 anki reviews every single day.

–Resources–

Jalup beginner deck

–Game plan–

1. Aiming at 15 cards a day for now. May up it/lower it depending on how much I’m understanding.
2. Learnt from all previous anki use to not allow myself to delay reviews until the evening because by then I’m to tired to do anything.

1. Done
2. Done
3. Done
Pretty happy with my progress and effort this month. I’m getting a little weary at the moment, but just 3 more months at this pace will see me finish the elementary school kanji, at which point I can switch things up a bit.

I chose die :/ I’m now modifying the sentence decks to omit the kanji on the front of the card and I am now imagining the kanji before I hit “show answer”. I also include the drawing diagram pictures on the back of the card for stroke order reference. I’m still making use of Kanji Kingdom, however, just as a deck to mine how to draw the kanji.

I may do RTK in the future, but as of now, it is the least fun part of my reviews so I digress.

I have modified the Kanji Kingdom deck to be much easier. That is to say, I am no longer going to attempt to draw or even imagine the kanji. I will still be reading the kanji as written. I also will only be doing 5 cards a day, which means in 16 months I will finish with it. I restarted my Intermediate deck. Now that I am trying to learn to draw the kanji through the vocab. I also need to make sure each card is updated and the best way to do this is incrementally and I believe I need to start fresh. As a consequence I am going to only add 10 cards a day instead of 25, so this means a at 14 months I will finish with the entire Jalup series.

I guess this comment works to reply to December’s Goal post as well. I successfully watched 1 anime a night but the holidays got in the way of everything else. Also, I had a separate goal for my winter break that got in the way as well. I am trying to master 317 kanji and many words that are used in them, adding up to 900 words I am trying to get through in one month, drawing them based on an audio recording. I had to build the cards too, around 60 cards a day, which combined with another goal of cleaning up a grammar deck just made my days full of stuff to get through and I didn’t always get through it. In the future I am going to be more conservative about how I set my goals so that they are more manageable.

– Finish 700 more RTK (from 900 – 1600) before the new year (approx 50 a day)
– Score 90% on my Japanese school exams
– maintain a zero balance on anki reviews
– Getting rid of all English for a week – no reading or writing English, all phone and study in Japanese, only Japanese to Japanese definitions, other than RTK.

Method – From the time of waking up, to the time I sleep, phone is in Japanese, no looking at messages from English friends, Studying Japanese through anki, Japanese school work, Japanese music, while doing nothing, working through my own Japanese dialogue in my head.
Rtk – Do it til i die every night.

1. Finish reading ダイヤのA volumes 2 and 3. Order volumes 4 and 5 if able.
2. Create at least 200 J-J cards. I created about 200 last month, so let’s try and maintain that.
3. Get started on chapter 7 of translation project.
4. Review results from Japanese Subject SAT when they are sent out and examine personal Japanese weaknesses accordingly. The test as a whole felt super easy, but there were a couple listening questions where I zoned out or got distracted and didn’t catch everything.
5. Zero anki reviews every day.

1. Completed. Instead of ordering volumes 4 and 5, I ordered volumes 1-5 of Daiya Act II since I’ve already watched the anime.
2. I created about 100 cards. Not as many as I had hoped, but still a significant amount for me.
3. Have not yet started.
4. I got a 730 out of 800, which is not quite the score I was hoping for. All of the questions I missed were in the listening section (except for 1 reading question), and is demonstrative of the fact that I do not do enough Japanese immersion.
5. Haha nope.

1. Go over first 800 kanji, using Japanese keywords only if I already know them. I’ve found my kanji slipping so I want to refresh them.
2. Finish Expert Part 1.
3. Finish watching Parasyte, and start a new series.

1. Not far off but I decided to give up around 600. However there’s a lot of rain forecast for the next few days so I’ll probably have more spare time to finish it after all. I call that a success.
2. Yes
3. Forgot this one. I watched all of parasyte until the last episode and then just lost interest in watching TV. Oh well…